Alastair Fowler
Alastair David Shaw Fowler CBE FBA (1930 – 9 October 2022) was a Scottish literary critic, editor, and an authority on Edmund Spenser, Renaissance literature, genre theory, and numerology.
Life and career
Alastair Fowler was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1930. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh, M.A. (1952). He was subsequently awarded an M.A. (1955), D.Phil. (1957) and D.Litt. (1962) from Oxford. As a graduate student at Oxford, Fowler studied with C. S. Lewis, and later edited Lewis's Spenser's Images of Life.
Fowler was a junior research fellow at
Known for his editorial work, Fowler's edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost, part of the Longman poets series, has some of the most scholarly and detailed notes on the poem and is widely cited by Milton scholars. Writing in The Guardian, John Mullan called it "a monument of scholarship."[3]
Fowler was critical of some later trends in literary scholarship, including "new historicism". In 2005, he published an extremely critical review of Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, which was widely discussed.[4]
Fowler was appointed
Fowler died on 9 October 2022, at the age of 92.[7]
Work
Edited volumes
- C. S. Lewis, Spenser's Images of Life, 1967
- John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1968, revised edition 2006
- Silent Poetry: Essays in Numerological Analysis, 1970
- Topics in Criticism, ed., with Christopher Butler, 1971
- The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse, 1991, 2008
- The Country House Poem, 1994.
Authored volumes (criticism)
- Spenser and the Numbers of Time, 1964.
- Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry, 1970
- Conceitful Thought: Interpretation of English Renaissance Poems, 1975
- Kinds of Literature, 1982.
- A History of English Literature, 1987
- Times Purple Masquers: Stars and the Afterlife in Renaissance English Literature, 1996
- Renaissance Realism, 2003
- How to Write, 2006
- Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature, 2012
Authored volumes (poetry)
- Seventeen, 1971
- Catacomb Suburb, 1976
- From the Domain of Arnheim, 1982
- Helen's Topless Towers, 1993
Reviews
- ISSN 0264-0856
See also
- Poioumenon
References
- ^ "Allastair Fowler (Debrett's online)". Retrieved 22 September 2013.
- ^ Fowler, Alastair (1982). "Robert Herrick" (PDF). Proceedings of the British Academy. 66: 243–264. (See Robert Herrick.)
- ISBN 1405832789.
- ^ Sutherland, John (16 February 2005). "Where there's a Will there's a payday". The Guardian, 15 February 2005. Retrieved 22 September 2013.
- ^ "No. 60728". The London Gazette (Supplement). 31 December 2013. p. 8.
- ^ "Fowler Papers at National Library of Scotland" (PDF).
- ^ "Fowler, Professor Alastair CBE FBA". The Times. 21 October 2022. Retrieved 21 October 2022.