Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (review)
persuasive connection to The Faerie Queene than to the Viewe. In his conclusion, Burlinson writes that “while it is essential for us to historicize Spenser’s poem, we have to recognize the difficulties and limitations of that historicizing approach” (221). These difficulties sometimes are apparent in this book, but the crucial question he keeps raising — how to understand Spenser as a materialist poet — finally may matter as much as the answers he provides. As Burlinson reminds us, “we encounter these literary and real objects as places . . . within a process of physical decay and forgetting (as with the ruins of Kilcoman Castle), a process of historical revision and material disappearance” in which Spenser’s imaginary and historical worlds intersect, and which this book helps us to remember (221). REBECA HELFER University of California, Irvine