Patrick Cheney is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of seven monographs and the editor of eleven collections, as well as the editor of poems by Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. A recipient of the Faculty Scholar Medal from Pennsylvania State University and the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Montana, Cheney has been a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Currently, he is General Editor of the 14-volume Oxford History of Poetry in English.

• Acknowledgements; Note on texts and references; Illustrations; Introduction: authorship and sublimity; 1. Citizenship and Godhood: a historical aesthetics of the sublime image, longinus to lyotard; 2. Spenser's sublime career; 3. Fictions of transport: Spenser's heroic sublime; 4. Tragedy and transport: Phantasia in Marlowe's poems and plays; 5. 'A world of figures': the Shakespearean sublime; 6. The sublime wit of Ben Jonson; Afterword: 'the Aonian mount': sublimity, eloquence, canonicity; Works cited; Index.

'A remarkable and important study that not only provides the missing link in the history of the sublime, but also redirects the reader towards what is truly great about the literature we read, study, and teach, and why. It is an extraordinarily ambitious project: the work maintains an intellectual focus, energy, and generosity throughout that explains and actually exemplifies the sublime.' Catherine Bates, University of Warwick