Nostalgia in Print and Performance, 1510-1613: Merry Worlds

For many people in early modern England the Reformation turned the past into another country: the 'merry world'. Nostalgia for this imaginary time, both widespread and widely contested, was commodified by a burgeoning entertainment industry. This book offers a new perspective on the making of 'Merry England', arguing that it was driven both by the desires of audiences and the marketing strategies of writers, publishers and playing companies. Nostalgia in Print and Performance juxtaposes plays with ballads and pamphlets, just as they were experienced by their first consumers. It argues that these commercial fictions played a central role in promoting and shaping nostalgia. At the same time, the fantasy of the merry world offered a powerfully affective language for conceptualising longing. For playwrights like Shakespeare and others writing for the commercial stage, it became a way to think through the dynamics of audience desire and the aesthetics of repetition.

Author: Harriet Phillips
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 06/27/2019
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.12lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9781108482271

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2020

About the Author
Phillips, Harriet: - Harriet Phillips is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on literature, popular culture and book history between 1500 and 1800. Her work has appeared in Shakespeare, Review of English Studies, Renaissance Studies, Parergon and Studies in Philology. She co-edited A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts (2018), and is co-editing Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica (forthcoming).