Textualised Objects

Material Culture in Early Modern English Literature


1. Auflage, 2012
281 Seiten

ISBN: 978-3-8253-5998-0
Sortiment: Buch
Ausgabe: Gebunden
Fachgebiet: Anglistik/Amerikanistik
Reihe: Anglistische Forschungen, Band: 429
lieferbar: 22.11.2012

Schlagwörter: Shakespeare, William, Sonett, Viktorianismus, englische Literatur, Kapitalismus, Materialismus, Frühmoderne, Gegenstände /i. d. Literatur, Royal Exchange, Nashe, Thomas, Gegenständlichkeit, Victorian Studies, Elisabethanisches Zeitalter


Early modern literature, in search of stable orders of things in a time of drastic changes, is teeming with material objects, the stuff of everyday life. Thus, it gives access to “great topics” of the early modern age, such as the rapidly emerging and mutating capitalism, the provisional and shifting constructions of literary subjects in relation to the objects around them.

This study traces the cultural biography of a material object, the most splendid edifice built in Elizabethan London: the Royal Exchange. It then analyses the rhetorical materialisations of the sonneteering vogue, with a special emphasis on the material history of the English sonnet between a manuscript and a print culture. Its last main object is Shakespeare’s Falstaff, whose massive body and powerful rhetoric are centres of early modern material orders and subversions, both in the histories and in the comedy of the ‘Merry Wives’. A conclusion applies the findings to the (im)material rhetoric of Thomas Nashe.

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Ralf Hertel in: Anglistik, 25.2 (2014), 165f

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Stephan Laqué in: Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, Bd. 150/2014, 256f

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Rebecca Olson in: Spenser Review, 44.1.14 (2014) online, URL: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/volume-44/441/reviews-1/joachim-frenk-textualised-objects-material-culture-in-early-modern-english-literature/