Selfish Gifts: The Politics of Exchange and English Courtly Literature, 1580-1628Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006 - 303 páginas Engaging with a wide range of texts on gift-theory, extending from Senecas De Beneficiis to Derridas Given Time, Selfish Gifts examines the importance of gift ethics and the rhetoric of honorable giving to the literature of late Elizabeth and early Stuart England. It demonstrates that the ideal of the freely given and disinterested gift shaped the language of early modern clientage, along with literary representations of patrons and patronage systems during this period. Selfish Gifts examines how early modern clients moved quickly and strategically to assimilate the language of competition and equality, characteristic of an emerging market economy, within their existing discourses of gift exchange, in order to maximize the rewards they might induce from an increasingly diverse group of patrons.To give is to exercise power and thus, as numerous modern gift-theorists and anthropologists elucidate, the gift is implicitly self-interested even as it derives value from appearing altruistic; nowhere is this paradox more significant than in a patronage economy such as that which shaped literary production in early modern England. In pursuing that paradox and its implications, Selfish Gifts highlights crucial connections and cultural tensions between political and sexual giving, between 'giving' truth and flattery, between the sovereignty and subjection of gift donor/recipient, and between strategic and so-called 'sacrificial' giving. Those tensions are examined in the context of the latter years of Elizabeth Is rule, through the contrasting reign of James I and up to the early Caroline period. -- |
Contenido
Acknowledgments | 9 |
Competitive Gifts and Strategic Exchange | 125 |
Gifts for the Somerset Wedding | 159 |
Derechos de autor | |
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Selfish Gifts: The Politics of Exchange and English Courtly Literature, 1580 ... Alison V. Scott Vista previa limitada - 2006 |
Selfish Gifts: The Politics of Exchange and English Courtly Literarture ... Alison V. Scott Sin vista previa disponible - 2005 |
Términos y frases comunes
Allophanes appear argues Astrophil benefits bestowed bond Bucking Cambridge Univ Carr Chapman Chicago clients Countess of Bedford court courtiers courtly criticism Culture Daniel defend Delia desire Donne Donne's donor Earl Early Modern economy Elizabeth Elizabethan England English epithalamium erotic Essex favor favorite flattery friendship gift economy gift exchange gift ideal giving grace honor Idios Idios's Jacobean James's John John Donne Jonson King James King Lear king's Lear Lear's literary London lover male marketplace masque mistress Moral Essays notion offered Oxford paradox Parthenophe patron patronage system Phaëton poem poet poet-lover poet-lover's poet's poetry political Portia Press Prince procreation sonnets queen receive recipient reciprocation refusal relationship Renaissance reward rhetoric Rosamond royal gift Samuel Daniel Sejanus self-interest Seneca sequence sexual Shakespeare's Sonnets social Somerset Somerset wedding sonnet 35 sonnet 48 speaker Stella Stephen Orgel Timon Timon of Athens tion trans truth verse writing