Re-situating Shakespeare as an early modern professional, in this book Patrick Cheney views him not simply as a man of the theatre, but also as an author with a literary career. Rather than present himself as a national or laureate poet, as Spenser does, Shakespeare conceals his authorship through dramaturgy, rendering his artistic techniques and literary ambitions opaque. Accordingly, recent scholars have attended more to his innovative theatricality or his indifference to textuality than to his contribution to modern English authorship. By tracking Shakespeare's 'counter-laureate authorship', Cheney builds upon his previous study on Shakespeare and literary authorship, and demonstrates the presence throughout the plays of sustained intertextual fictions about the twin media of printed poetry and theatrical performance. In challenging Spenser as England's National Poet, Shakespeare reinvents English authorship as a key part of his legacy.
The New York Times bestselling author blends a pitch-perfect childlike voice with keen adult observation as she shares her heartrending, groundbreaking insider’s look into the fascinating and frighten
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
Cheney (art history and cultural studies, U. of Massachusetts Lowell) examines these unique structures, amongst the few designed, built and decorated by an artist for his own use. Focusing on the hous
In the eighteenth century, the Cul de Sac plain in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, was a vast open-air workhouse of sugar plantations. This microhistory of one plantation owned by the Ferron de la Ferronna
A major new biography of the fourth U.S. president, from New York Times?bestselling author Lynne Cheney James Madison was a true genius of the early republic, the leader who did more than any other to
The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa has defined the childhoods of an entire generation. Over the past twenty years, international NGOs and charities have devoted immense attention to the millions of Afric
Re-situating Shakespeare as an early modern professional, in this book Patrick Cheney views him not simply as a man of the theatre, but also as an author with a literary career. Rather than present himself as a national or laureate poet, as Spenser does, Shakespeare conceals his authorship through dramaturgy, rendering his artistic techniques and literary ambitions opaque. Accordingly, recent scholars have attended more to his innovative theatricality or his indifference to textuality than to his contribution to modern English authorship. By tracking Shakespeare's 'counter-laureate authorship', Cheney builds upon his previous study on Shakespeare and literary authorship, and demonstrates the presence throughout the plays of sustained intertextual fictions about the twin media of printed poetry and theatrical performance. In challenging Spenser as England's National Poet, Shakespeare reinvents English authorship as a key part of his legacy.
Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright is an important book which reassesses Shakespeare as a poet and dramatist. Patrick Cheney contests critical preoccupation with Shakespeare as 'a man of the theatre' by recovering his original standing as an early modern author: he is a working dramatist who composes some of the most extraordinary poems in English. The book accounts for this form of authorship by reconstructing the historical preconditions for its emergence, in England as in Europe, including the building of the commercial theatres and the consolidation of the printing press. Cheney traces the literary origin to Shakespeare's favourite author, Ovid, who wrote the Amores and Metamorphoses alongside the tragedy Medea. Cheney also examines Shakespeare's literary relations with his contemporary authors Edmund Spenser and Christopher Marlowe. The book concentrates on Shakespeare's freestanding poems, but makes frequent reference to the plays, and ranges widely through the work of other
In his debut collection, Colin Cheney maps an American landscape of New York rooftop gardens, occupied Iraq, and crumbling New England farms. In poems inhabited by Charles Darwin and climate scientis
Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession presents the first comprehensive reading of the Marlowe canon in over a generation. The occasion for Patrick Cheney's rereading is a primary discovery: Marlowe organiz
