Alastair David Shaw FowlerCBEFBA (1930 – 9 October 2022) was a Scottish literary critic, editor, and an authority on Edmund Spenser, Renaissance literature, genre theory, and numerology.
Life and careeredit
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 Queen's College, Oxford (1955–1959). He also taught at Swansea (1959–1961), and Brasenose College, Oxford (1962–1971). He was Regius Professor of literature at the University of Edinburgh (1972–1984) and also taught intermittently at universities in the United States, including Columbia (1964) and the University of Virginia (1969, 1979, 1985–1998).[1] He delivered the 1980 Warton Lecture on English Poetry.[2]
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]
The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse, 1991, 2008
The Country House Poem, 1994.
Authored volumes (criticism)edit
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)edit
Seventeen, 1971
Catacomb Suburb, 1976
From the Domain of Arnheim, 1982
Helen's Topless Towers, 1993
Reviewsedit
Craig, Cairns (1982), Giving Speech to the Silent, which includes a review of From the Domain of Arnheim, in Hearn, Sheila G. (ed.), Cencrastus No. 10, Autumn 1982, pp. 43 & 44, ISSN 0264-0856