“Disdeining life, desiring leaue to die”. Spenser and the Psychology of Despair

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 sha...