THE FACE OF MAMMON by David Landreth ( 9780190628222 ) - Books & Audio Books at Pickabook.co.uk

Item Details

Title:

THE FACE OF MAMMON
THE MATTER OF MONEY IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE

By:

David Landreth

Format:

Paperback

List price:

£25.49

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£22.30

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12.5% off

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£3.19

ISBN 10:

0190628227

ISBN 13:

9780190628222

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Publisher:

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS INC

Pub. date:

1 May, 2017

Pages:

362

Description:

Relying on works by Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Nashe, and Donne, The Face of Mammon argues that the coinage of the sixteenth century is a very different object from the money that we know today-not only formally but conceptually, in that modern money is the object proper to a discourse, economics, that had not yet taken shape in the sixteenth century. Instead, David Landreth reveals that a Renaissance coin is an arena contested among multiple earlymodern discourses that each seek to encompass it, such as ontology, ethics, and politics.

Synopsis:

Money talked in sixteenth-century England, as money still does today. But what the sixteenth century's gold and silver had to say for itself is strikingly different from the modern discourse of money. As David Landreth demonstrates in The Face of Mammon, the material and historical differences between the coins of the English Renaissance and today's paper and electronic money propel a distinctive and complex assessment of the relation between material substance and human value. Although the sixteenth century was marked by the traumatic emergence of conditions that would prove to be characteristic of the modern economy, the discipline of economics had not been invented to assess those conditions. The Face of Mammon considers how literary texts investigated these unexplained material transformations through attention to the materiality of gold and silver money.In new readings of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Jew of Malta, three plays by Shakespeare-King John, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure-the poetry of John Donne, and the prose of Thomas Nashe, Landreth argues that these texts situate the act of exchange at the center of a system of "common wealth" that sought to integrate political, ethical, and religious values with material ones, and probe the ways in which market value corrodes that system even as it depends upon it. Joining the methods of material-culture studies to those of economic criticism, The Face of Mammon offers a new account of the historical transformations of the concept of value to scholars of early modern literature, culture, and art, as well as to those interested in economic history.

Illustrations:

8 halftones

Publication:

Imprint:

Oxford University Press Inc

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Non-returnable

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