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

di Patrick Cheney (Autore)

Cambridge University Press, 2022

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.

• Autore: Patrick Cheney
• Editore: Cambridge University Press
• Anno: 2022
• Rilegatura: Paperback / softback
• Pagine: 328 p.
• Dimensioni: 228 x 150 mm
• Peso: 480 gr.
• EAN: 9781107627918

Testo in English