Thomas Nashe in Context by Lorna Hutson, Hardcover, 9780198128762 | Buy online at The Nile
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Thomas Nashe in Context

Author: Lorna Hutson   Series: Oxford English Monographs

This work aims to promote an appreciation of Nashe's work and challenges the tendency to read Nashe's pamphlets as commercially-motivated, arguing that each text's significance lies in its parody of the rhetorical media determining contemporary assumptions about the authority of printed discourse.

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Summary

This work aims to promote an appreciation of Nashe's work and challenges the tendency to read Nashe's pamphlets as commercially-motivated, arguing that each text's significance lies in its parody of the rhetorical media determining contemporary assumptions about the authority of printed discourse.

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Description

Challenging the tendency to disparage Nashe's writing as the product of an eccentric sensibility and to explain his texts in journalistic terms more appropriate to modern commercial publishing, this work provides an entirely new interpretation of the economic context of sixteenth-century literature. Lorna Hutson reveals hitherto overlooked links between humanist approaches to the literary text and the transformation of the English economy through humanist-inspiredpolicies of ethical and social reform; from this context, Nashe's textual prodigality emerges as an assault upon the contemporary impoverishment of literary activity caused by the political over-valuingof the printed word. Generic precedents turn out to be festive; each of Nashe's apparently unstructured pamphlets derives shaping energy from traditions of popular-festive mockery. The pamphlets bring an older conception of seasonal prosperity into subversive dialogue with the newer discourse of provident individualism. For Nashe, stylistic experiment is shown to mean more than a choice of style; it is, rather, the expression of an intricate, socially engaged imagination.

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Critic Reviews

“'To Hutson's credit, she is largely successful, avoiding both excessive topicality and the subordination of Nashe's style to the content she teases out.'Alexandra Halasz, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 4/92”

To Hutson's credit, she is largely successful, avoiding both excessive topicality and the subordination of Nashe's style to the content she teases out.'Alexandra Halasz, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 4/92'ambitious and original book ...In its subtle and resourceful combination of historical and theoretical interests, Thomas Nashe in Context marks an exceptionally distinguished contribution to Renaissance studies with implications that go a long way beyond the immediate topic.'David Norbrook, Magdalen College, Oxford, The Review of English Studies, Volume XLII, Number 165, February 1991Hutson's use of economic theory, most directly retailed in Chapter 4, proves a powerful search-light for illuminating a number of Nashe's works and is relevant beyond the confines of Nashe studies ... Much of Nashe's stylistic acrobatics may look on first acquaintance like mere entertainment, but at its best the style reflects a set of extreme convictions deeply held. We owe to this study a fresh insight into the nature of these convictions and the"context" to which they were the reaction.'Anglia

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About the Author

Lorna Hutson was born in Germany to Scottish parents and was educated in San Francisco, Edinburgh, and Oxford. At Oxford she wrote a PhD thesis on Thomas Nashe which was published by OUP as Thomas Nashe in Context (1989). From 1985-1998 she was Lecturer and then Reader at Queen Mary College, London,
and wrote The Usurer's Daughter (Routledge, 1994). In 2001, as Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, she edited, with Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe. She was the recipient, in 2004-5 of an award from John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to write The<B

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More on this Book

Challenging the tendency to disparage Nashe's writing as the product of an eccentric sensibility and to explain his texts in journalistic terms more appropriate to modern commercial publishing, this work provides an entirely new interpretation of the economic context of sixteenth-century literature. Lorna Hutson reveals hitherto overlooked links between humanist approaches to the literary text and the transformation of the English economy through humanist-inspired policies of ethical and social reform; from this context, Nashe's textual prodigality emerges as an assault upon the contemporary impoverishment of literary activity caused by the political over-valuing of the printed word. Generic precedents turn out to be festive; each of Nashe's apparently unstructured pamphlets derives shaping energy from traditions of popular-festive mockery. The pamphlets bring an older conception of seasonal prosperity into subversive dialogue with the newer discourse of provident individualism. For Nashe, stylistic experiment is shown to mean more than a choice of style; it is, rather, the expression of an intricate, socially engaged imagination.

Read more

Product Details

Publisher
Clarendon Press
Published
30th April 1997
Pages
264
ISBN
9780198128762

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