Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Van Renen’s study is a welcome addition to the existing studies of early modern culture and society and will open new doors into studying the marginal, the silenced and the invisible in culture and in literature."—Iman Sheeha,
Review of English Studies"A thoughtful, useful book that outlines the rise of middle class ideologies, as they pertain to certain texts (drama and novels) written over a 100-year period."—Michael Boecherer,
English: Journal of the English Association"
The Other Exchange offers an ambitious investigation of socioeconomic tensions and conflicts as they played out in drama and fiction from the early seventeenth century to the early eighteenth. In this span of time, England's capitalist economy was codified in ways that, as Van Renen reminds his readers, enmeshed the nation in networks of global commerce, reoriented its built environment in relation to the natural world, and generated new literary forms."—Elizabeth Rivlin,
Renaissance Quarterly“This subtle and perceptive book shakes many of our assumptions about early modern comic writing. Van Renen reads these texts as exchanges between the elite and the ‘formidable and fluid counterpublic’ of women and the poor, and does so convincingly.”—Matthew Steggle, professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University
“Van Renen cogently elucidates the complex means by which the working poor provide a crucial template for the conditions of modern capitalism. His fascinating argument and nuanced readings make this book vital to any study of the early modern period.”—Rajani Sudan, professor of English at Southern Methodist University and author of
The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism “Remarkable in its thematic and chronological breadth,
The Other Exchange productively balances close formalist analysis of its texts with a thorough critical and historical contextualization.
The Other Exchange offers an extremely valuable contribution to discussion of early modern London, economic thought, vagrancy, and internal colonialism, among other issues.”—Mark Netzloff, associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and author of
England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English ColonialismTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Early Modern Multitudes
1. Printing English Identity in Jonson’s
The Staple of News and Brome’s
The English Moore 2. Representing the Town on Brome’s Stage
3. Reanimating the Theater and English Social Life in Behn’s
The Rover and
The City Heiress 4. Warfare and Its Assault on English Rural Life in Farquhar’s
The Recruiting Officer 5. Vagabonds and the “Restoration” of London in Defoe’s
A Journal of the Plague Year 6. Fiction and Finance in Haywood’s
The British Recluse Epilogue: Jonathan Swift and the End of Labor
Notes
Bibliography
Index
