1st Edition

The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature

By Rachel Stenner Copyright 2019
    216 Pages
    by Routledge

    216 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    The typographic imaginary is an aesthetic linking authors from William Caxton to Alexander Pope, this study centrally contends. Early modern English literature engages imaginatively with printing and this book both characterizes that engagement and proposes the typographic imaginary as a framework for its analysis. Certain texts, Rachel Stenner states, describe the people, places, concerns, and processes of printing in ways that, over time, generate their own figurative authority. The typographic imaginary is posited as a literary phenomenon shared by different writers, a wider cultural understanding of printing, and a critical concept for unpicking the particular imaginative otherness that printing introduced to literature. Authors use the typographic imaginary to interrogate their place in an evolving media environment, to assess the value of the printed text, and to analyse the roles of other text-producing agents. This book treats a broad array of authors and forms: printers’ manuals; William Caxton’s paratexts; the pamphlet dialogues of Robert Copland and Ned Ward; poetic miscellanies; the prose fictions of William Baldwin, George Gascoigne, and Thomas Nashe; the poetry and prose of Edmund Spenser; writings by John Taylor and Alexander Pope. At its broadest, this study contributes to an understanding of how technology changes cultures. Located at the crossroads between literary, material, and book historical research, the particular intervention that this work makes is threefold. In describing the typographic imaginary, it proposes a new framework for analysis of print culture. It aims to focus critical engagement on symbolic representations of material forms. Finally, it describes a lineage of late medieval and early modern authors, stretching from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, that are linked by their engagement of a particular aesthetic.

    Contents





    List of Figures v



    Acknowledgements vi



    Note on Quotation vii



    Abbreviations viii





    Introduction: Print and the Difference it Makes 1



    Implications 7



    Critical Mapping 16



    Cases 26





    Chapter 1: Instructional Texts and Print Symbolism: Christopher Plantin, Hieronymus Hornschuch, and Joseph Moxon 51



    Processes 55



    People 69



    Conclusion 77





    Chapter 2: An Emergent Typographic Imaginary in William Caxton’s Paratexts 86



    Life in Literature, Diplomacy, and Commerce 88



    The Benefits of Printing in Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye 90



    Imagined Typographic Space 96



    Reorganising Continuity: Mirrour of the World 104



    Conclusion 112





    Chapter 3: Robert Copland, Thomas Blague, and the Printer-Author Dialogue 124



    Printer-Author Dialogue and its Mutations 126



    Characterising the Printer: Gatekeepers of the Press 130



    Print and Metacommunication: Uses of the Dialogue Form 145



    Conclusion 153





    Chapter 4: Protestant Printing and Humanism in Beware the Cat: Undoing Printing 164



    Protestant Printer and Humanist Scholar 168



    Dead Bodies and Printer’s Devils 174



    Printing and Penning 178



    Conclusion 183





    Chapter 5: George Gascoigne and Richard Tottel: Negotiating Manuscript and Print in the Poetic Miscellany 193



    Typographic Value in the Prefatory Poses of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres 199



    The Benefits of Printing in The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire 209



    Conclusion 215





    Chapter 6: Edmund Spenser’s Early and Mid Career: Public Image and Machine Horror



    223



    Early Career Self-Presentation: The Shepeardes Calender and Three Proper, and Wittie, Familiar Letters 225



    Monstrous Typographic Fertility in The Faerie Queene 232



    Resonant Errour in ‘The Teares of the Muses’ 244



    Conclusion 247





    Chapter 7 St Paul’s Churchyard and the Meanings of Print: Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell 259



    Nashe’s Mosaic of the Print Trade 266



    Waste and Matter 274



    The Figurative Authority of Print 280



    Conclusion 282





    Conclusion: Love and Loathing in Grub Street 289



    Biography

    Rachel Stenner lectures in Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK.