The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England

Early modern pamphlets serve as an important vehicle for examining print culture, particularly the historical entanglement between the technology of print and a developing capitalism. Attention to the controversies surrounding their circulation reveals that pamphlets became a focus for anxieties about print culture in general. Alexandra Halasz combines close readings of pamphlets by Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Deloney and John Taylor, among others, with a discussion of the history and deployment of print technology and its specifically English organization as a monopoly. Taking account of the theoretical and historical issues surrounding textual property, authorship and publicity, The Marketplace of Print, first published in 1997, is both a work of historical recovery and a reflection on the ongoing problems of the relationship between the marketplace and the public sphere.