Bøger af Patrick Cheney

Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion presents twenty-eight original essays on the major poems of the English Renaissance. Each essay is written by a leading scholar and examines a poem in the context of an important topic in early modern culture. The selections provide groundbreaking scholarship on subjects ranging from the invention of English verse, Petrarchism, pastoral, elegy, and satire to women's religious verse, the politics of town, the place of homoeroticism, and Cavalier poetry. An ideal supplement to both primary texts and anthologies of Renaissance literature, Early Modern English Poetry offers fresh approaches to poems by Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, John Milton, and many others. The first three chapters set the rest of the volume in context with coverage of the sixteenth-century invention of verse, print and manuscript culture in early modern England, and Renaissance treatises on the art of poetry. The remaining chapters are structured around authors and their works--which are each related to a specific issue in early modern culture--and organized chronologically according to the dates of composition or publication of the poems discussed. This innovative and flexible design corresponds perfectly with courses in which students first read a primary text and then expand their understanding of the work with detailed critical commentary. The book is enhanced by a general introduction, recommended reading lists at the end of each chapter, and a chronology of Renaissance poetry tailored to the book's contents. Early Modern English Poetry provides an accessible introduction both to a key selection of canonical poetic works in English and to historical and cultural topics that illuminate them.

In Spenser's famous Flight, Patrick Cheney challenges the received wisdom about the shape and goal of Spenser's literary career. He contends that Spenser's idea of a literary career is not strictly the convential Virgilian pattern of pastoral to epic, but a Christian revision of that pattern in light of Petrarch and the Reformation.Cheney demonstrates that, far from changing his mind about his career as a result of disillusionment, Spenser embarks upon and completes a daring progress that secures his status as an Orphic poet.In October, Spenser calls his idea of a literary career the 'famous flight.' Both classical and Christian culture has authorized the myth of the winged poet as a primary myth of fame and glory. Cheney shows that throughout his poetry Spenser relies on an image of flight to accomplish his highest goal.

Cheney argues that Marlowe organizes his canon around an "Ovidian" career model, or cursus, which turns from amatory poetry to tragedy to epic. The first comprehensive reading of the Marlowe canon in over a generation.

Christopher Marlowe is considered to be Renaissance England's first great poet-playwright. This volume presents Marlowe's achievement as a poet within the context of his dramatic career. It also presents his poems as a series of works collaboratively produced in Elizabethan England's manuscript and print culture.

In this first book-length study in the fieldof authorial criticism, various specialists from Italian, French, English, and Spanish studies collectively discuss literary careers spanning from classical antiquity through the Renaissance.