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Shakespeare’s First Folio and the fetish of the book

Authors :
Brian Cummings
Source :
Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies. 93:50-69
Publication Year :
2017
Publisher :
SAGE Publications, 2017.

Abstract

Prospero’s renunciation of his book in The Tempest acknowledges its power as a kind of ‘fetish’. This essay traces the idea of the book as ‘commodity fetish’ and as material text. The argument examines how post-Marxist thought, in a new reading of Louis Althusser, might be used to challenge the Shakespeare of late capitalism. It suggests how a complex reading of the fetish in historiography, combining a history of the material book in Shakespeare, with a theoretical reading of William Pietz, Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Stallybrass, sheds light on the First Folio, one of the most famous – and fetishized – books in history.

Details

ISSN :
20544715 and 01847678
Volume :
93
Database :
OpenAIRE
Journal :
Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies
Accession number :
edsair.doi.dedup.....3c745e06fea819473b5841ece3d61f5c
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1177/0184767817698932