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"Profit and Delight"
Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640–1682

Adam Smyth		 "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.
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.
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.		 "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

Adam Smyth teaches in the School of English and American Literature at the University of Reading.
 
$42.95s cloth / ISBN 0-8143-3014-2

304 pages / 6 x 9
2 illustrations

2004

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