Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene is a book-length poem by a contemporary of Shakespeare that combines national epic, chivalric romance, and moral allegory. From 1596 on, Spenser’s readers have been interacting with the poem to produce new paratextual material: tools to navigate and understand the text, adaptations in other genres and media, additions to a work that is both massive and notoriously unfinished. In 21L709, we spend a whole semester reading this “lit brick” – and final projects follow in this tradition of active reading.
This project by Ivy Li (S.B. ’20, Physics and Literature) translates part of FQ’s 4th book into the modern medium of comics. Using roughly a tenth as many words as the original, it makes shapely narrative from a part of the poem that used to be considered incoherent and obscure. - Prof. Mary Fuller, MIT Literature