Title: Cultural semiotics, Spenser, and the captive woman
First published: 1995
Description: In Cultural Semiotics, Spenser, and the Captive Woman, author Louise Schleiner uses concepts from A. J. Greimas to analyze The Shepheardes Calender (1579) as a discourse and as a definitive text for the Elizabethan "political unconscious," in the sense of Fredric Jameson, who also drew on Greimas.

The book demonstrates sociolinguistic patterns at work in Elizabethan ideological conflicts, at a level that shows how those patterns were related to the energies of people's sexuality and their political and religious commitments.

Through explaining this libidinal and political functioning of the Calender, in its time and for Spenser as a new poet, the book identifies an "ideologeme," widely observable in England of the 1580s and 1590s: that of the captive/capturing woman, a unit of interfactional and interclass discourse.

As well as discussing Spenser, two chapters include examples from music and balladry and use the "captive woman" construct to analyze material from such figures as Lyly, Shakespeare, the composer John Dowland, the Countess of Pembroke, and Queen Elizabeth I.

A concluding chapter on the Calender's proferred text-readership game shows Spenser evolving his ordering of the twelve eclogues through inventing a strategic frame for them, an implied story that both celebrates and leaves behind his passionate friendship with Gabriel Harvey.
Subjects: History, Characters, Women and literature, Literature and society, Semiotics and literature, Sex role in literature, Women, Spenser, edmund, 1552?-1599, Political and social views
Places: England
People: Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599)
Time periods: 16th century
LC classification: PR2367.W6 S35 1995