Sublimity

Abstract

In this book, I argue for the importance of an ‘early modern sublime’ to the advent of modern English authorship in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In making this argument, I yoke together two topics that literary criticism typically keeps separate: ‘The Author’ and ‘The Sublime’. These are titles to two New Critical Idiom volumes, both published by Routledge in : The Author, by Andrew Bennett; and The Sublime, by Philip Shaw. While Shaw never refers to the category of ‘the author’ directly, Bennett mentions ‘the sublime’ twice in passing (, ), opening up a possibility that I suggest is important to English literary history: the connection between authorship and sublimity is vital to the formation of a modern literary canon. Bennett and Shaw write their books for the Routledge series because ‘the author’ and ‘the sublime’ constitute two major terms of modern critical theory. An important body of criticism addresses ‘the author’. Bennett goes so far as to write: