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    Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture

    Kirk Melnikoff (Author)

    9781487502232

    Hardback, published 29 March 2018

    312 pages
    23.5 x 15.9 x 2.5 cm, 0.63 kg

    "This book is rife with references to practices and people not often discussed, but Melnikoff’s integration of terminology, Elizabethan classics, and applied techniques leaves an open door for both publishing professionals and newly interested readers to engage with the peculiarities of sixteenth century publishing."

    - Marina Garcia, Portland State University (Publishing Research Quarterly, vol 35)

    Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture explores the influence of the book trade over English literary culture in the decades following incorporation of the Stationers’ Company in 1557. Through an analysis of the often overlooked contributions of bookmen like Thomas Hacket, Richard Smith, and Paul Linley, Kirk Melnikoff tracks the crucial role that bookselling publishers played in transmitting literary texts into print as well as energizing and shaping a new sphere of vernacular literary activity.

    The volume provides an overview of the full range of practises that publishers performed, including the acquisition of copy and titles, compiling, alteration to texts, reissuing, and specialization. Four case studies together consider links between translation and the travel narrative; bookselling and authorship; re-issuing and the Ovidian narrative poem; and specialization and professional drama. Works considered include Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Thévet’s The New Found World, Constable’s Diana, and Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage. This exciting new book provides both a complement and a counter to recent studies that have turned back to authors and out to buyers and printing houses as makers of vernacular literary culture in the second half of the sixteenth century.

    1. Geldings, "
      prettie inuentions,"
      and "
      plaine knauery"
      : Elizabethan Book-Trade Publishing Practices
    2. Thomas Hacket, Translation, and the Wonders of the New World Travel Narrative
    3. Richard Smith&
      #x2019
      s Browsibles: A Hundreth Sundry Flowers (1573), The Fabulous Tales of Aesop (1577), and Diana (1592, 1594?)
    4. Flasket and Linley&
      #x2019
      s The Tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage (1594): Reissuing the Elizabethan Epyllion
    5. Reading Hamlet (1603): Nicholas Ling, Sententiae, and Republicanism
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