ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 acknowledges that much of Spenser’s work, including A View of the State of Ireland and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, engages with the concept of nationhood and England’s growing importance on a world stage. His was also a life of exiles. I argue that Spenser represents a nation-less exile—a man in-between lands and cultures. Given that, this chapter examines how Spenser’s mind of exile draws on the exilic discourse discussed in the previous chapters while he struggles and ultimately fails to defend English colonial expansion. Colonizers, although not traditional exiles, work to transform their “not-home” into native soil. I argue that Colin represents a proto-colonial figure and Spenser a proto-colonial writer. Both A View and Colin Clout open up questions about Spenser’s ideas surrounding England’s attempts to bring a Catholic Ireland completely under the English (and Protestant) crown emerging from Spenser’s unique position between lands and nations.
