The Status of Reading in Early Modern English Literature.

reading public;early print;material text;William Shakespeare;Aemilia Lanyer;Ben Jonson;English Language and Literature;Humanities;English Language and Literature

Zukerman, CordeliaMullaney, Steven G. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: reading public;    early print;    material text;    William Shakespeare;    Aemilia Lanyer;    Ben Jonson;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities;    English Language and Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/113541/czukerma_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

;;The Status of Reading in Early Modern English Literature;; explores the social implications of print publication in England from the 1590s to the 1630s. Analyzing the fictional worlds of texts and their material forms, ;;The Status of Reading;; pushes against a scholarly trend that emphasizes writers’ anxieties and fears about print publication. It claims instead that writers often invoked a popular reading public in opposition to the elite, rarefied world of aristocratic court circles. This reading public was tied to the needs and ideas of the writers who called it into being, and who used it strategically to explore their own cultural importance and the growing importance of people outside the ranks of the aristocracy as taste-makers. In invoking this reading public, writers developed new notions of status and claimed an alternate hierarchy of intellectual merit that existed in tension with the social hierarchy. Their works explore various ways people could achieve this new status: attaining an aristocratic title through proving one’s intelligence and wit; gaining cultural capital based on popularity; or asserting the unique value of cultural contributions made by people whose gender or social position were considered subordinate. The texts under consideration—Christopher Marlowe’s ;;Doctor Faustus;;; William Shakespeare’s ;;Twelfth Night,;; ;;Macbeth,;; ;;Love’s Labour’s Lost,;; ;;As You Like It,;; and ;;Sonnets;;; Aemilia Lanyer’s ;;Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum;;; and Ben Jonson’s ;;The New Inn;; and ;;Ode to Himself;;—foreground multiple forms of publication to different readers. Each text stages fictional reading practices and the circulation of texts; moreover, its print manifestation addresses imagined readers to whom the text is marketed. Together, these texts challenge traditional hierarchical structures on two fronts: while exploring what it meant for readers to advance socially through reading well, they also suggest that a popular reading public, made of commoners, should be considered just as culturally valuable—or perhaps more culturally valuable—than smaller, socially elite communities of readers. In attending to the ways writers constructed and empowered a common reading public, ;;The Status of Reading;; significantly expands our understanding of the social dynamics of reading in an age of increasing literacy and access to texts.