English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime
Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson

Linking ecstasy with art and liberty, the book advances understanding of Renaissance literature as a field in the humanities today.

Patrick Cheney (Author)

9781107627918, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 23 June 2022

328 pages, 2 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15 x 1.8 cm, 0.48 kg

'Patrick Cheney, observing a resurgence of interest in the idea of the sublime, has contributed an original and persuasive book on this subject … The book meticulously catalogs and analyzes uses of the word sublime throughout the period.' Richard F. Hardin, Renaissance Quarterly

Patrick Cheney's new book places the sublime at the heart of poems and plays in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Specifically, Cheney argues for the importance of an 'early modern sublime' to the advent of modern authorship in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson. Chapters feature a model of creative excellence and social liberty that helps explain the greatness of the English Renaissance. Cheney's argument revises the received wisdom, which locates the sublime in the eighteenth-century philosophical 'subject'. The book demonstrates that canonical works like The Faerie Queene and King Lear reinvent sublimity as a new standard of authorship. This standard emerges not only in rational, patriotic paradigms of classical and Christian goodness but also in the eternizing greatness of the author's work: free, heightened, ecstatic. Playing a centralizing role in the advent of modern authorship, the early modern sublime becomes a catalyst in the formation of an English canon.

Acknowledgements
Note on texts and references
Illustrations
Introduction: authorship and sublimity
1. Citizenship and Godhood: a historical aesthetics of the sublime image, longinus to lyotard
2. Spenser's sublime career
3. Fictions of transport: Spenser's heroic sublime
4. Tragedy and transport: Phantasia in Marlowe's poems and plays
5. 'A world of figures': the Shakespearean sublime
6. The sublime wit of Ben Jonson
Afterword: 'the Aonian mount': sublimity, eloquence, canonicity
Works cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]