The Marketplace of Print

Early modern pamphlets serve as an important vehicle for examining print culture, particularly the historical entanglement between the technology of print and a developing capitalism. Attention to the controversies surrounding their circulation reveals that pamphlets became a focus for anxieties about print culture in general. Alexandra Halasz combines close readings of pamphlets by Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Deloney and John Taylor, among others, with a discussion of the history and deployment of print technology and its specifically English organization as a monopoly. Taking account of the theoretical and historical issues surrounding textual property, authorship and publicity, The Marketplace of Print is both a work of historical recovery and a reflection on the ongoing problems of the relationship between the marketplace and the public sphere.

• Rethinks ideas about the media, past and present, especially the relationship between print, the marketplace and the public sphere • Close study of prominent early modern pamphlets and their importance in their own time • Provides insight into the developing conflict between technology and capitalism

Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Print matters; 2. Figuring the marketplace of print; 3. The patrimony of learning; 4. Artisanal dispossession; 5. The public sphere and the marketplace; Afterword; Notes; Bibliography; Index.