Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Worlds Apart
  • Cited by 280
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
November 2009
Print publication year:
1986
Online ISBN:
9780511571404
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511571404
Subjects:
History, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
Information

Book description

Drawing on a variety of disciplines and documents, Professor Agnew illuminates one of the most fascinating chapters in the formations of Anglo-American market culture. Worlds Apart traces the history of our concepts of the marketplace and the theatre and the ways in which these concepts are bound together. Focusing on Britain and America in the years 1550 to 1750, the book discusses the forms and conventions that structured both commerce and theatre. As marketing practice broke free of its traditional boundaries and restraints, it challenged longstanding popular assumptions about the constituents of value, the nature of identity, the signs of authenticity, and the limits of liability. New exchange relations bred new legal and commercial fictions to authorise them, but they also bred new doubts about the precise grounds upon which the self and its 'interests' were to be represented. Those same doubts, Professor Agnew shows, animated the theatre as well. As actors and playwrights shifted from ecclesiastical and civic drama to professional entertainments, they too devised authenticating fictions, fictions that effectively replicated the bewildering representational confusions of the new 'placeless market'.

Reviews

"This is a wide-ranging, thought-provoking book...It is impossible to illustrate here the width and depth of Agnew's insights. They cover carnival and festive celebrations generally, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, courtesy books, rogue literature, character books, Francis Bacon, John Bulwer's theory of gesture as the universal communicative medium (1644-9-a new discovery for me), Hobbes (a key figure in Agnew's thesis), Addison, Shaftesbury, and Adam Smith's common sense philosophy. This appears to be Professor Agnew's first book. It is a remarkable achievement." Christopher Hill

"...an arresting, stimulating book, ambitious in scope and impressively erudite...It is elegant, original, expansive. A very impressive monograph by a sharp intellect, it should be read by everyone with an interest in the major social themes of early modern culture." American Historical Review

"...an important and original work...Agnew is able to demonstrate far more powerfully than previous writers why the new forms assumed by Elizabethan and Jacobean theater were so disturbing to contemporaries and of such enduring power....succeed[s] magnificently in establishing this theater as a prime source of the metaphors out of which a discourse upon capitalism was eventually constructed." The Nation

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.