Abstract
Prospero’s renunciation of his book in The Tempest acknowledges its power as a kind of ‘fetish’. This essay traces the idea of the book as ‘commodity fetish’ and as material text. The argument examines how post-Marxist thought, in a new reading of Louis Althusser,might be used to challenge the Shakespeare of late capitalism. It suggests how a complex reading of the fetish in historiography, combining a history of the material book in Shakespeare, with a theoretical reading of WilliamPietz, Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Stallybrass, sheds light on the First Folio, one of the most famous – and fetishized – books in history.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 50-69 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Cahiers Elisabethains |
Volume | 93 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 27 Mar 2017 |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jul 2017 |
Bibliographical note
© 2017, The Author(s). This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details.Keywords
- Fetishism
- historiography
- material texts
- First Folio
- Shakespeare
- Louis Althusser
- post-Marxism