Spenser is a delirious poet. He can't plough straight. What he builds is shiftier, twistier, than anything dreamed up or put down by M C. Escher. I began thinking and writing about The Faerie Queene in the early 1950s, and that poem has never let me go because it has never let me in, has kept me digging outside its crooked walls for five decades in a responsive delirium of interpretation, mucking about at the alexandrine foot of the castle, furrowed by its aura, looking for the unlikely wicket, the machicolated flicker of light, the unravelled end of a Phaedrian lifeline winding through secret passages toward the Transcendence and toward the moment when finally I might give myself to be stigmatized not (as I already well know) by the beams of that Transcendence but by the harrowing teeth of its Judgment, its Proscription, for it will ask me why I dared presume and it will proclaim where I went wrong and how I, unworthy to be there, must find my way back out or be forever lost in its sandy bowels. I am The Faerie Queene's Joseph K. But what follows is not my testimony, not my confession, only the delirium momentarily straitened and reduced to its method before it releases itself into the obliquity of example ....So begins Resisting Allegory, the final statement by the leading Spenser critic of our time (or any time) of a lifetime’s commitment to the theory and practice of textual interpretation. Spenser’s great poem provides the occasion for a searching and comprehensive interdisciplinary exploration of reading practices¾those the author advocates as well as those he adapts or criticizes in entertaining a wide range of critical arguments with his celebrated combination of intellectual generosity and rigorous questioning.

Harry Berger, Jr. (Author)

Harry Berger, Jr., is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Art History and a Fellow of Cowell College at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the author of fourteen books, most recently Harrying: Skills of Offense in Shakespeare's Henriad (Fordham University Press, 2016).

David Lee Miller (Edited By)

David Lee Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrifiial Sons and the Father’s Witness (Cornell University Press, 2003) and The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton University Press, 1988).