Paola Baseotto's important study stresses death's ubiquity as a concept in Spenser's works
always present in intimate relation to life whether in the recurring disturbing figures of
deathwishers characters who seem to belong as much to the dead as the living or as a
perspective challenging both characters and readers to reassess their own apprehension of
death and the way in which it shapes our lives. Baseotto's analyses of Spenser's deathwishers
and living dead focus our attention on some of the most compelling and distinctive images in
Spenser's work illuminating our understanding of their power and significance through a
combination of detailed attention to language and context and a thoroughly informed
understanding of contemporaneous religious ideas and attitudes. Through close and sensitive
study of Spenser's writing from The Shepheardes Calender through The Faerie Queene to such
little discussed poems as The Ruines of Time and Daphnaida in Complaints Baseotto establishes
the centrality the subtlety and the distinctiveness of Spenser's figuring of death. Baseotto's
study offers us a new and illuminating understanding of an aspect of Spenser's writing that is
fundamental but which has been strangely neglected in recent decades. - Elizabeth Heale
(Senior Lecturer University of Reading)Author of The Faerie Queene: A Reader's Guide
(Cambridge University Press 1987 1999) and Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse
(Palgrave 2003).Exhaustive and succinct rigorous and readable Baseotto examines Spenser's
obsession with death and shows us what a remarkable independent and surprisingly modern
sensibility he had. Here is a Spenser who engages our sympathies with unexpected intensity.-
Tim Parks (Lecturer IULM University Milan) Novelist and frequent contributor to the New York
Review of Books.
