Awards

• Winner of CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2021.
• Winner of Winner, 2020 John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2021.

Overview

When poetry was printed, poets and their publishers could no longer take for granted that readers would have the necessary knowledge and skill to read it well. By making poems available to anyone who either had the means to a buy a book or knew someone who did, print publication radically expanded the early modern reading public. These new readers, publishers feared, might not buy or like the books. Worse, their misreadings could put the authors, the publishers, or the readers themselves at risk.Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England focuses on early modern publishers' efforts to identify and accommodate new readers of verse that had previously been restricted to particular social networks in manuscript. Focusing on the period between the maturing of the market for printed English literature in the 1590s and the emergence of the professional poet following the Restoration, this study shows that poetry was shaped by--and itself shaped--strong print publication traditions. By reading printed editions of poems by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and others, this book shows how publishers negotiated genre, gender, social access, reputation, literary knowledge, and the value of English literature itself. It uses literary, historical, bibliographical, and quantitative evidence to show how publishers' strategies changed over time. Ultimately, Doubtful Readers argues that although--or perhaps because--publishers' interpretive and editorial efforts are often elided in studies of early modern poetry, their interventions have had an enduring impact on our canons, texts, and literary histories.

Full Product Details

9780198836476

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Reviews

Doubtful Readers is an essential study that makes book history and bibliography accessible and vital for scholars and students of early modern literature. Through an emphasis on the material book, its construction, and the agency behind it, this study offers fresh readings of a number of the poems it considers in detail and provides an important model for interweaving bibliography and literary criticism. * Amy Lidster, The Spenser Review * Doubtful Readers offers a much-needed corrective to received notions about the importance of print collections of poetry in early modern Britain...Doubtful Readers is an important addition to early modern literary studies and to the understanding of the development of lyric poetry in English. * J.D. Sharpe, Houghton College, CHOICE *

Doubtful Readers offers a much-needed corrective to received notions about the importance of print collections of poetry in early modern Britain...Doubtful Readers is an important addition to early modern literary studies and to the understanding of the development of lyric poetry in English. * J.D. Sharpe, Houghton College, CHOICE *

Author Information

Erin A. McCarthy is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests include sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, material texts, the history of reading, and women's writing. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher on the European Research Council-funded project 'RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women's Writing, 1550-1700' at the National University of Ireland, Galway. This research will be the basis of a monograph jointly authored with Marie-Louise Coolahan and Sajed Chowdhury.

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