English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime

English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 329
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781108638883
ISBN-13 : 1108638880
Rating : 4/5 (880 Downloads)

Book Synopsis English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime by : Patrick Cheney

Download or read book English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime written by Patrick Cheney and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.


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