Review of the hardback: 'The essays that make up the collection are uniformly of a high standard. This is a stimulating and authoritative contribution to our understanding of the many ways readers have sought authority through, and over, their texts.' SHARP News

Review of the hardback: 'Modern readers can expect to receive pleasure rather than pain from this handsome, engaging and wide-ranging [] volume … for early modernist scholars who are serious about attending to early modern readers, this volume will serve as an indispensable guide.' History

Review of the hardback: 'This book is provocative and informative.' Sixteenth Century Journal

This book ranges over private and public reading, and over a variety of religious, social, and scientific communities to locate acts of reading in specific historical moments from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It also charts the changes in reading habits that reflect broader social and political shifts during the period. A team of expert contributors cover topics including the processes of book production and distribution, audiences and markets, the material text, the relation of print to performance, and the politics of acts of reception. In addition, the volume emphasises the independence of early modern readers and their role in making meaning in an age in which increased literacy equaled social enfranchisement and interpretation was power. Meaning was not simply an authorial act but the work of many hands and processes, from editing, printing, and proofing, to reproducing, distributing, and finally reading.
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This book charts the changes in reading habits that reflect broader social and political shifts in Early Modern England.
List of illustrations; List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction: discovering the Renaissance reader Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker; Part I. The Material Text: 1. Errata: print, politics, and poetry in early modern England Seth Lerer; 2. Abandoning the capital in eighteenth-century London Richard Wendorf; Part II. Reading as Politics: 3. 'Boasting of silence': women readers and the patriarchal state Heidi Brayman Hackel; 4. Reading revelations: prophecy, hermeneutics and politics in early modern Britain Kevin Sharpe; Part III. Print, Politics and Performance: 5. Performances and playbooks: the closing of the theatres and the politics of drama David Scott Kastan; 6. Irrational, impractical and unprofitable: reading the news in seventeenth-century Britain Joad Raymond; Part IV. Reading Physiologies: 7. Reading bodies Michael Shoenfeldt; 8. Reading and experiment in the early Royal Society Adrian Johns; Part V. Reading Texts in Time: 9. Martial, Jonson and the assertion of plagiarism Joseph Loewenstein; 10. The constitution of opinion and the pacification of reading Steven N. Zwicker; 11. Cato's retreat: fabula, historia and the question of constitutionalism in Mr Locke's anonymous Essay on Government Kirsie M. McClure; Index.
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This book charts the changes in reading habits that reflect broader social and political shifts in early modern England.

Product details

ISBN
9780521824347
Published
2003-07-10
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Weight
720 gr
Height
229 mm
Width
152 mm
Thickness
25 mm
Age
P, 06
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Number of pages
374

Biographical note

Kevin Sharpe is fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the English Association. He has authored and edited 11 books, including Remapping Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000) and Criticism and Compliment (1999). Steven Zwicker is Elkin Professor of Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written widely on seventeenth-century literature and politics, and together with Kevin Sharpe has edited Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution (1998) and Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (1987). His own monographs include Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (1984) and Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-1689 (1993).