A01=Emma Smith
Amadis De Gaule
Author_Emma Smith
Beaumont
Boccaccio
book
Category=DS
Category=DSB
Category=DSBD
Category=NHD
Countess
early
Early Modern
Early Modern Book Trade
Edward III
Elizabethan Editions
Elizabethan Period
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Faerie Queene
Follow
Gloucester
Hold
ian
John Charlewood
lesser
Metrical Psalter
modern
News Pamphlets
Octavo
period
popularity
print
Print Popularity
Psalm Books
Richard III
STC
Steady Selling
Thinges
trade
Young Men
zachary
Zachary Lesser
Product details
- ISBN 9780367879068
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 12 Dec 2019
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Engaging with histories of the book and of reading, as well as with studies of material culture, this volume explores ’popularity’ in early modern English writings. Is ’popular’ best described as a theoretical or an empirical category in this period? How can we account for the gap between modern canonicity and early modern print popularity? How might we weight the evidence of popularity from citations, serial editions, print runs, reworkings, or extant copies? Is something that sells a lot always popular, even where the readership for print is only a small proportion of the population, or does popular need to carry something of its etymological sense of the public, the people? Four initial chapters sketch out the conceptual and evidential issues, while the second part of the book consists of ten short chapters-a ’hit parade’- in which eminent scholars take a genre or a single exemplar - play, romance, sermon, or almanac, among other categories-as a means to articulate more general issues. Throughout, the aim is to unpack and interrogate assumptions about the popular, and to decentre canonical narratives about, for example, the sermons of Donne or Andrewes over Smith, or the plays of Shakespeare over Mucedorus. Revisiting Elizabethan literary culture through the lenses of popularity, this collection allows us to view the subject from an unfamiliar angle-in which almanacs are more popular than sonnets and proclamations more numerous than plays, and in which authors familiar to us are displaced by names now often forgotten.
Andy Kesson is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Roehampton, UK. Emma Smith is Fellow and Tutor in English at Hertford College, Oxford, UK.
