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The Political Economy of the English Rogue
- The Eighteenth Century
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 55, Numbers 2-3, Summer/Fall 2014
- pp. 175-191
- 10.1353/ecy.2014.0017
- Article
- Additional Information
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Rogue narratives represent figures who are, on the one hand, economically and political dispossessed, and on the other, free from constrains of religious morality, social mores and the law. Social marginality allows these figures in texts like The English Rogue (1665), to transform their rootlessness into instantiations of political economy, especially the notion of a market which scripts and codes value onto contentless things through exchange and circulation. As a figure that has no private property to speak of, the rogue’s use of his own body in acts of consumption and exchange reveals a complex early-modern understanding of the links between the sex-gender economy and political economy.