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Full Description
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.
Contents
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.
