Research & Scholarly Activity

• Before the Threshold
  SJSU
  SJSU, 2006-3000

  Description: I am currently assembling a sorucebook of early English epithalamia--or wedding poetry. The proposed collection primarily includes versions of the epithamium that were circulating in England prior to and immediately following the publication of Spenser?s work (up to 1632). The purpose of such an anthology is to assemble the variety of texts that influenced Spenser or responded to his poems, and, consequently, to open up the study of a form with a unique ideological matrix to poststructuralist analyses. The presentation of the epithalamic form, in all of its variations, enables a glimpse of the dynamic relationship between the collective structures of Elizabethan society and the ideological notions inherent in the form itself. A compilation of texts that comprised the form in England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth-centuries illuminates not only Spenser?s culture and poetry, but also the explosion of epithalamia that made the form the poetic fashion in the seventeenth century.