Sick Economies Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare's
England Jonathan Gil Harris ""Sick Economies," wholeheartedly
committed to the recovery of noncanonical early modern writing,
shows what can happen when a keen literary intelligence is applied
to nonliterary texts. The result is a truly interdisciplinary and
refreshingly readable book."--"Times Literary Supplement" "In this
important book Harris explores the early modern discourse of
mercantilism, tracing its merger with the discourse of bodily
illness."--"Choice" "Harris has successfully argued a decidedly
unique angle of interpretation. What may have initially struck the
reader as an impossibly broad scope of inquiry is revealed, through
rigorous textual analysis, as an intriguing interdisciplinary
perspective that will certainly impact subsequent
scholarship."--"Comitatus" "This book offers great insight into the
Renaissance discourses of the body, the emergence of mercantile
theory, and early modern drama."--"Seventeenth-Century News" From
French Physiocrat theories of the blood-like circulation of wealth
to Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the market, the body has played
a crucial role in Western perceptions of the economic. In
Renaissance culture, however, the dominant bodily metaphors for
national wealth and economy were derived from the relatively new
language of infectious disease. Whereas traditional Galenic
medicine had understood illness as a state of imbalance within the
body, early modern writers increasingly reimagined disease as an
invasive foreign agent. The rapid rise of global trade in the
sixteenth century, and the resulting migrations of people, money,
and commodities across national borders, contributed to this
growing pathologization of the foreign; conversely, the new
trade-inflected vocabularies of disease helped writers to represent
the contours of national and global economies. Grounded in
scrupulous analyses of cultural and economic history, "Sick
Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare's
England" teases out the double helix of the pathological and the
economic in two seemingly disparate spheres of early modern textual
production: drama and mercantilist writing. Of particular interest
to this study are the ways English playwrights, such as
Shakespeare, Jonson, Heywood, Massinger, and Middleton, and
mercantilists, such as Malynes, Milles, Misselden, and Mun, rooted
their conceptions of national economy in the language of disease.
Some of these diseases--syphilis, taint, canker, plague,
hepatitis--have subsequently lost their economic connotations;
others--most notably consumption--remain integral to the modern
economic lexicon but have by and large shed their pathological
senses. Breaking new ground by analyzing English mercantilism
primarily as a discursive rather than an ideological or economic
system, "Sick Economies" provides a compelling history of how, even
in our own time, defenses of transnational economy have
paradoxically pathologized the foreign. In the process, Jonathan
Gil Harris argues that what we now regard as the discrete sphere of
the economic cannot be disentangled from seemingly unrelated
domains of Renaissance culture, especially medicine and the
theater. Jonathan Gil Harris is Professor of English at George
Washington University and the author of "Foreign Bodies and the
Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern
England." 2003 272 pages 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 ISBN 978-0-8122-3773-3 Cloth
$69.95s 45.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-0219-9 Ebook $69.95s 45.50 World
Rights Literature, Cultural Studies Short copy: "Sick Economies:
Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare's England" teases
out the double helix of the pathological and the economic in two
seemingly disparate spheres of early modern textual production:
drama and mercantilist writing.
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