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forthcoming
Product details
- ISBN 9780197910801
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 29 Oct 2026
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Golden Age Elysium follows the publication of Patrick Cheney's Placing Elysium in Renaissance Britain: Poetry, Politics, Theology, Eros. Together, the two books are the first to study the Elysian Golden Age as a temporal place in English Renaissance culture. Collectively, they posit that Renaissance England records an under-examined myth combining literature and geography central to national identity: the myth of England as Golden Age Elysium.
The myth emerges in Camden's Britannia, who traces it to Plutarch. The myth sutures an idealized temporal concept to an idealized spatial one, becoming central to Shakespeare, Jonson, the Cavaliers (Herrick, Cowley, Carew, Fanshawe, Suckling, Lovelace, Margaret Cavendish), Milton, and Marvell. Linking time and space, it becomes what Bakhtin calls an idealized chronotope, important to national identity.
At its center is an idealized individual, who becomes a signature of Renaissance culture: the godlike individual: 'A thing divine', says Shakespeare's Miranda when first seeing her future husband, Ferdinand. Throughout, Golden Age Elysium argues that English Renaissance authors organize poetry and drama around a literary geography wedding the Golden Age and the Elysian Fields to create an idealized template for processing civic trauma, especially in the lead-up to the Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration.
Patrick Cheney is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative literature at Penn State University. He has published seven monographs, two scholarly editions, ten collections of essays, and two Oxford Histories. He serves as General Editor of The Oxford History of Poetry in English, and is a General Editor of The Oxford Edition of the Collected Works of Edmund Spenser. He has been a Christensen Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford; a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford; and a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford.
