English authorship and the early modern sublime : fictions of transport in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson

Resource Information

The work English authorship and the early modern sublime : fictions of transport in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in European University Institute. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

English authorship and the early modern sublime : fictions of transport in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson

Title remainder

fictions of transport in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson

Statement of responsibility

Patrick Cheney

Creator

• Cheney, Patrick, 1949-

Subject

• English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism
• English drama -- 17th century -- History and criticism
• English drama -- Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 -- History and criticism
• Sublime, The, in literature

Language

eng

Summary

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.--

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

UkCbUP

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Series statement

Cambridge Social Sciences eBooks