Edmund Spenser, Famine Memory and the Discontents of Humanism in

Abstract

Theodor Adorno's post-humanist account of has established the aftermath of World War Two as a preeminent context for interpreting the play, but the violent origins of Ireland's Protestant Ascendancy, as foreshadowed in Spenser's (1596), provide equally compelling evidence of the intimate relationship between civilizing pretension and barbaric practice. By way of a betrayal of W. B. Yeats's suppression of the darker aspects of the Ascendancy's Irish history, in particular the Irish Famine of 1845-1852, can be seen to interrogate the discontents of humanism in both Ireland and on the Continent.