English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime

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.