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Full Description
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.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: "You're Great": Value, Time, and the Reader's Work in Seventeenth-Century Poems of Praise
Chapter 1: The Value of Now: Jonson, Literary Presents, and the Surveying Reader
Chapter 2: Insignificant Numbers: Sequence, Size, and the Value of Counting in Herrick and Marvell
Chapter 3: More Mine, Then Thine: Praise, "Praise," and the Repetition of Value in Devotional Poetry
Chapter 4: She's Dead: Metaphorical Work and Exemplary Mourning in Marvell, Hutchinson, and Bradstreet
Chapter 5: Henceforth Thus Then: Explanation, Repetition, and Praise in Paradise Lost
Conclusion: Time's Up: Learning from Praise
Notes
Bibliography
