Economies of Praise: Value, Labor, and Form in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780810146709)

Reevaluates early modern poems of praise as, paradoxically, challenging an artistic economy that values exchange and productivity

Early modern poems of praise typically insist that they do not have a purpose or enact real labor beyond their effortless listing of laudable qualities. And yet the poets discussed in this study, including Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, Anne Bradstreet, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton, hint at an alternative aesthetic economy at work in their verse. Poetic praise, it turns out, might show us a social world outside the organizing principle of exchange.

In Economies of Praise: Value, Labor, and Form in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, Ryan Netzley explores how poems of praise imagine alternatives to market and gift economies and point instead to a self-contained aesthetic economy that works against a more expansive and productivist understanding of literary art. By depicting exchange as inconsequential, unproductive, and redundant rather than a necessary constituent of social order, these poems model for modern readers a world without the imperative to create, appraise, and repeatedly demonstrate one's own value.

Author: Ryan Netzley
ISBN-10: 0810146703
ISBN-13: 9780810146709
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Language: English
Published: 03/15/2024
Pages: 256
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs