Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England (review)

Aaron Kitch's Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England examines how new attitudes toward economic problems in late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century England were joined to new political ideas about state regulation and governance in the same period: as its title indicates, the book tracks the emergence of that domain of inquiry that we recognize today as "political economy," as viewed through early modern literary writing across a wide range of genres. The book extends from More to Milton and touches on most major authors in between, with particular attention to Spenser, Marlowe, Nashe, Middleton, and Jonson. Kitch is equally comfortable analyzing prose, poetry, and drama, with forays into other historical documents from the period, such as royal proclamations and mercantile writings, to name only two; he is particularly well informed about the immediate political and religious contexts for his authors and the literary traditions that inform them. The strengths of the book are in its broad range of reference, including genres of writing that receive comparatively little critical discussion, such as Lord Mayor's shows, and its general bibliography of scholarship on the problem of "political economy."

The arguments connecting this historical material to exemplary literary texts are plausible, even convincing, but some readers may not find them surprising. Kitch has a strongly developed sense of what used to be called intertextuality: he is very good at identifying sources, analogies, and thematic resonances between a specific passage and other works; he effectively gathers telling examples together in the same place and establishes clear chains of reference among them. Political Economy and the States of Literature achieves impressive sweep; if it is not groundbreaking, this shouldn't take away from the clarity with which Kitch presents his materials and the synthesis he offers of problems that are of enduring interest. His book will be a necessary and valuable resource for anyone who is beginning to undertake research on problems of economy and literature and to early modern scholars more broadly who are looking to canvas the field or prepare a section of a course on literature and economic thought.

A survey of the book's chapters will give a sense of its range. As is usual, the introduction lays out the book's primary argument and methodological claims. It announces a departure from conventional new historicist method and from the Marxist approaches that dominated discussions of economic history and literary representation in the 1980s and 1990s, in part by shifting our attention to religious ideas and their influence on poets and playwrights who sought to come to terms with new economic practices and concepts. It would be fair to say that the introduction's methodological claims are somewhat overstated. Kitch focuses in more detail on economic questions than did the first generation of new historicist critics, but his interlocutors will be familiar to scholars working in this area, who will also recognize many of the primary sources. In the end, the book's method looks like fairly conventional historicist criticism in its Foucauldian or Jamesonian varieties: the problem of literary form (whatever its specific genre or mode) can be explained by referring it to larger historical debates and social phenomena. Kitch "addresses alterations to literary form in terms of an early modern discourse of political economy" (14), and the elusiveness of that "in terms of " is regrettable, since it points to a certain opacity at the core of his approach. But the book's overarching argument is nonetheless clear enough: whereas in classical and medieval culture, "economics," ethics, and politics all formed part of the larger rubric of moral philosophy, in the late sixteenth century "economics" was emerging as a distinct area of inquiry that was increasingly the subject of direct political policy and debate (3). literary writers working in many genres and many different institutional contexts were aware of these changes and chose to address...