"A learned, ambitious, sharply argued, and consequential book.In a forceful reconsideration of the aesthetic as itself a site of political thought, Pye is throwing down the gauntlet against the prevailing climate of historicist work in early modern literary criticism, which has placed the Renaissance before the arrival of the aesthetic as a category." -Andrew Daniel, Johns Hopkins University "Drawing on a rich and wide-ranging selection of important works from Leonardo da Vinci to Thomas Hobbes s Leviathan, through the plays of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare, Christopher Pye makes a powerful case for the existence of an autonomous early modern aesthetic prior to Kant, through readings that are highly attentive to textual detail and theoretically informed by thinkers from philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis."--Philip Lorenz, Cornell University "This is scholarship that does not hesitate to strike out against the errors of earlier critics. Pye goes in chosen directions that prove rewarding."--Bibliothque d'Humanisme et Renaissance The Storm at Sea proves successful because it will prompt early modern literature scholars to reevaluate the foundational methodological assumptions of historicist work. The Storm at Sea is a challenging but rewarding read that generates questions long after its completion."--Renaissance Quarterly ".

in Christopher Pye's The Storm at Sea: Political Aesthetics in the Time of Shakespeare the weather is an altogether different beast. For Pye, the storm at sea is a metaphor for the 'interval between theocentric institutions and the appearance of the formal state.' This 'interval' is especially compelling in this book because it foregrounds aesthetic autonomy as a 'privileged space in which the problem of foundations as such is engaged."-Shakespeare Survey.