Conclusion

Summary

This book began with a set of contentions about two approaches to The Faerie Queene, to Spenserian poetics, and to Renaissance literature, and an attempt to bring these two approaches together. Material culture and space have recently taken an increasingly prominent place in criticism of the early modern period, and work on them has contributed to a reconsideration of the place of history, and the idea of the real, in literary study. This interest in material culture has been invigorated by a growing attention – partly a result of changes in literary historicist practice but also the consequence of an engagement with sociological and anthropological writing and earlier kinds of Marxist criticism – to objects as well as subjects, and the lives of these objects in literature and the world. This criticism has so far proved most useful to the study of early modern drama, reminding us how embedded it was in the material exchanges and dealings of the society around it, and also challenging our idea of it as an empty, dematerialized space, the domain only of poetic language. It was one of this book's ambitions to show that the study of material culture might also provide a useful point from which to approach allegorical romance. As for space and spatiality, critics and theorists from Henri Lefebvre onwards have shown that we should see it as something more than an abstract continuum, and more than just a way of understanding narrative – rather, as something that encloses, comprises, and is produced by social and political organisation and practice.