“So faire a place, as Nature can deuize”: An Ecocritical Analysis of Spenser’s Faerie Queene

This dissertation offers an ecocritical analysis of "The Faerie Queene", exploring how Spenser constructs the natural world across the poem. Drawing on approaches such as the biophilia-ecophobia spectrum, postcolonial ecocriticism, and material ecocriticism, it examines the poem’s depictions of the environment, the human responses they elicit, and the forms of material and transformative agency attributed to natural elements. The first chapter outlines these theoretical frameworks, explains their relevance to Spenser’s poem, and establishes the rationale for reading "The Faerie Queene" ecocritically. The study then examines Spenser's allegory and charts the poem’s natural landscapes (namely, green spaces, waterscapes, animals, caves, islands, and wastelands), analysing the relationship between nature and artifice and how these environments function within the poem's narrative and symbolic economy. The third chapter explores processes of environmental transformation, focussing on the interaction between wild and tamed spaces, the dialectic of indoors and outdoors, and nature's role as a theatrical space that shapes events and characters. This dissertation thus argues that "The Faerie Queene" relies on a complex environmental imaginary that offers a valuable lens through which we can better understand early modern attitudes towards the environment and human-nature relations within the poem.