An innovative work of both economic anthropology and literary
history, Arts of Possession draws on philosophical, theoretical,
literary, historical, and archival sources and insights to situate
the household at the center of the social and cultural imagination
of fourteenth-century England.
D. Vance Smith argues that in a period commonly represented as
precapitalist there actually existed a sophisticated economic
discourse -- and that discourse underlies common forms of
representation and the writing of literary texts. His work provides
a new historiography of capital and of the development of the
relation between economic sophistication and cultural
practices.
Smith reads well-known and less-appreciated works -- such as
Winner and Waster, Sir Launfal, The Canterbury Tales, and Piers
Plowman -- for what they can tell us about the surpluses and
economies that drew the medieval imagination, and about the complex
ethics of possession at the heart of the fourteenth-century
household. In bringing this to light, Smith's book itself becomes
an eloquent meditation on the poetics and ethics of possession.
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