Cultural Semiotics, Spenser, and the Captive Woman

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.