English authorship and the early modern sublime : Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson. / Patrick Cheney.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cheney, Patrick, 1949- author.

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English literature.

Sublime, The, in literature.

English drama--Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600--History and criticism.

English drama.

English drama--17th century--History and criticism.

English drama--Early modern and Elizabethan.

English literature--Early modern.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xiv, 312 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2018.

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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: authorship and sublimity

Citizenship and Godhood: a historical aesthetics of the sublime image, longinus to lyotard

Spenser's sublime career

Fictions of transport: Spenser's heroic sublime

Tragedy and transport: Phantasia in Marlowe's poems and plays

'A world of figures': the Shakespearean sublime

The sublime wit of Ben Jonson

Afterword: 'the Aonian mount': sublimity, eloquence, canonicity.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 265-290) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9781107049628

1107049628

9781107627918

1107627915

OCLC:

1002295985