"Colin's Campus argues that pastoral poetry is inevitably a backwards-looking genre, preoccupied with the past. This preoccupation in the case of Spenser, as well as his pastoral followers, returned him to the Cambridge he had recently left behind, not the court to which he never really arrived.". "Responding to the pastoral-court connection which has been at the center of nearly all historical considerations of pastoral for the past two decades, this study invites readers to seriously consider the reverse connection, that is, the academic ingredients in the pastoral world."--BOOK JACKET.