Profit and Delight

Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640-1682

By Adam Smyth

Cloth - 9780814330142 (Out-Of-Print)


Published 2004
Pages: 238

Subjects: Language and Literature: Renaissance


Description

"Profit and Delight" gives long overdue attention to a popular literary phenomenon that defies today’s conventional understandings of literature. Claiming to educate young gentlemen in the social arts, miscellanies were booklets that circulated widely in early modern England. They bundled together writing from diverse sources—play texts, song books, educational tracts, poetry collections—but rarely acknowledged authorship. The material, which was frequently altered from the original, was of a Royalist bent and often celebrated drinking and carousing. Readers could learn about courtship, however, through poetry, word games, sample love letters, and even romantic one-liners.

Who produced and who actually read miscellanies are among many questions explored in this in-depth study. Rejecting traditional authorcentric approaches, Adam Smyth instead draws upon research into the early modern cultures of manuscript and print. He begins with a rigorous consideration of the literary traditions from which printed miscellanies emerged and the functions the booklets proposed to serve. Through his analysis of marginalia in extant copies of these booklets Smyth constructs a profile of miscellany readers and shows how their readings often differed from those prescribed by the texts. Smyth also addresses textual transmission, emphasizing the fluidity of the publication process. Finally, the author examines the politics of printed miscellanies.

An unprecedented analysis of a popular literary genre, Profit and Delight deepens our understanding of miscellanies and reveals them to be malleable, evolving texts that were often reworked not only by compilers and publishers but also by readers.

Published by Wayne State University Press

Author(s)

Adam Smyth teaches in the School of English and American Literature at the University of Reading.

Reviews

“Smyth himself examines the poems from a number of angles in order to illuminate their seventeenth-century contexts and their implications for current literary criticism.  Smyth’s arguments are modestly but forcefully made, backed with analyses of readers’ behaviour which are both subtle and enjoyable.”

— Royal Stuart Review


“Adam Smyth’s book on print miscellanies of the mid-to-late seventeenth century fills a scholarly gap which had been apparent since the publication, a decade earlier, of such landmark studies as Mary Hobb’s Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts (1992), Harold Love’s Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (1993) and Arthur Marotti’s Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (1995).  This neglect has now been admirably rectified by Adam Smyth’s Profit and Delight, which provides an entertaining and eminently knowledgeable guide to printed miscellanies of the period 1640-1682.  Far from exhausting its subject, this witty and innovative monograph, like the miscellanies themselves, provides a tantalizing glimpse of textual riches, and leaves its readers curious for more.”

— Early Modern Literary Studies


“Mr. Smyth’s scholarship is first-rate.  [He] articulates clearly and effectively the differences between printed and manuscript texts, the aspects of generic slippage, and textual alterations and fragmentation.  Furthermore, [he] excels on textual instability, textual transmission across genres, the ‘effacement of authorship,’ and the class between public and private voices.  As Mr. Smyth notes early in the book, there has been a general ‘critical neglect’ of these miscellanies, and no ‘sustained evaluation’ of them has appeared since an unpublished doctoral dissertation in 1943.  An evaluation now exists—and it is a most excellent effort.”                                                       

— Scriblerian


“[“Profit and Delight”: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640—1682] surveys a large and largely untilled field from several angles, breaking a good deal of new ground in a clear, vivid, and engaging manner...Adam Smyth has given us a very useful consideration of the contents, character, and reception of the printed verse miscellanies of later seventeenth-century England.”

— Modern Philology


“Smyth draws on his study of printed miscellanies to argue ambitiously (and I believe rightly) for a new sociocentric, as opposed to authorcentric, approach to early modern verse, embracing variation rather than authoritative texts of poems.”

— Studies in English Literature


"This is a ground-breaking study that is extraordinarily well researched and written, carefully guiding the reader via clear and modest generalizations through empirical thicket of materials, and written with a fresh a loving regard for language(underliners will find themselves wanting to underline whole paragraphs)...There comes a useful appendix with bibliographical details of the core texts, arranged in a chart, the 45 pp. of notes with ample references and added particulars, a good bibliography of sources material, and the index(moving beyond titles and proper names to common genres and topics of the miscellanies)."

— The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer


"Smyth provides an extremely useful overview of the kinds of works deployed in these anthologies, the ways in which their contents evolved decade by decade, what kinds of readership they were designed to serve, and with what strategies the books approached their audience. His knowledge of manuscript anthologies, essential to a full understanding of their printed counterparts, is more than adequate for the task."

— Steven W. May, Georgetown College


"This is a work of impressive scholarship that asks exciting questions of the literary culture of seventeenth century England, helping to reform our understanding of the media of print and manuscript in the period and revealing the multiple modes of interaction between them."

— Andrew Gordon, University of Aberdeen