Thomas Nashe in Context

by Lorna Hutson

Overview

Offering an entirely new interpretation of the economic context of 16th-century literature, this book challenges the tendency to explain Nashe's texts in journalistic and commercial terms. Hutson reveals a previously overlooked link between humanist approaches to the literary text and the social and ethical transformation of the English economy. She blames lack of literary activity in general on the political emphasis and value placed on the printed word, and demonstrates that Nashe's work was the result of an intricate, socially engaged imagination rather than an eccentric sensibility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198128762
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/09/1989
Series:	Oxford English Monographs
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	5.63(w) x 8.81(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

University of London

Table of Contents

	Illustrations	x
	Abbreviations	xi
	Checklist of Nashe's Writings	xii
	Introduction: Critical Contexts	1
Part I	The Contexts
1.	Consuming Resources: Literature in Economic Context, 1558-1592	15
2.	The Profitable Discourse of the Elizabethans	38
3.	Publication: Credit and Profit	55
4.	Festivity and Productivity	72
5.	Nashe and Popular Festive Pastime	100
6.	Nashe's Literary Theory	120
7.	Nashe, Mock-Testament, and Menippean Dialogue	127
Part II	The Texts
8.	Wasting Time in Summers Last Will and Testament	155
9.	Pierce Penilesse, the Bankrupt's Carnival	172
10.	Gabriel Harvey and the Politics of Publication	197
11.	Credit for the Page of The Unfortunate Traveller	215
12.	Patronage as the Red Herring of Lenten Stuffe	245
	Works Cited	269
	Index	285

Editorial Reviews

"Acute, knowledgeable, and suggestive....The state-of-the-art contextualization of Nashe in the present crtical phase."—Modern Philology

"What distinguishes Hutson's work is her earnest effort to read Nashe's texts, as her title promises, in contexts that make them meaningful in terms of broader questions of education and politics at the end of the sixteenth century."—Journal of English and Germanic Philology

From the Publisher