Golden Age Elysium

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.