The typographic imaginary is an aesthetic linking authors from William Caxton to Alexander Pope, this study centrally contends. Early modern English literature engages imaginatively with printing and this book both characterizes that engagement and proposes the typographic imaginary as a framework for its analysis. Certain texts, Rachel Stenner states, describe the people, places, concerns, and processes of printing in ways that, over time, generate their own figurative authority. The typographic imaginary is posited as a literary phenomenon shared by different writers, a wider cultural understanding of printing, and a critical concept for unpicking the particular imaginative otherness that printing introduced to literature. Authors use the typographic imaginary to interrogate their place in an evolving media environment, to assess the value of the printed text, and to analyse the roles of other text-producing agents. This book treats a broad array of authors and forms: printers’ manuals; William Caxton’s paratexts; the pamphlet dialogues of Robert Copland and Ned Ward; poetic miscellanies; the prose fictions of William Baldwin, George Gascoigne, and Thomas Nashe; the poetry and prose of Edmund Spenser; writings by John Taylor and Alexander Pope. At its broadest, this study contributes to an understanding of how technology changes cultures. Located at the crossroads between literary, material, and book historical research, the particular intervention that this work makes is threefold. In describing the typographic imaginary, it proposes a new framework for analysis of print culture. It aims to focus critical engagement on symbolic representations of material forms. Finally, it describes a lineage of late medieval and early modern authors, stretching from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, that are linked by their engagement of a particular aesthetic.

Table of Contents:
Contents List of Figures v Acknowledgements vi Note on Quotation vii Abbreviations viii Introduction: Print and the Difference it Makes 1 Implications 7 Critical Mapping 16 Cases 26 Chapter 1: Instructional Texts and Print Symbolism: Christopher Plantin, Hieronymus Hornschuch, and Joseph Moxon 51 Processes 55 People 69 Conclusion 77 Chapter 2: An Emergent Typographic Imaginary in William Caxton’s Paratexts 86 Life in Literature, Diplomacy, and Commerce 88 The Benefits of Printing in Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye 90 Imagined Typographic Space 96 Reorganising Continuity: Mirrour of the World 104 Conclusion 112 Chapter 3: Robert Copland, Thomas Blague, and the Printer-Author Dialogue 124 Printer-Author Dialogue and its Mutations 126 Characterising the Printer: Gatekeepers of the Press 130 Print and Metacommunication: Uses of the Dialogue Form 145 Conclusion 153 Chapter 4: Protestant Printing and Humanism in Beware the Cat: Undoing Printing 164 Protestant Printer and Humanist Scholar 168 Dead Bodies and Printer’s Devils 174 Printing and Penning 178 Conclusion 183 Chapter 5: George Gascoigne and Richard Tottel: Negotiating Manuscript and Print in the Poetic Miscellany 193 Typographic Value in the Prefatory Poses of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres 199 The Benefits of Printing in The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire 209 Conclusion 215 Chapter 6: Edmund Spenser’s Early and Mid Career: Public Image and Machine Horror 223 Early Career Self-Presentation: The Shepeardes Calender and Three Proper, and Wittie, Familiar Letters 225 Monstrous Typographic Fertility in The Faerie Queene 232 Resonant Errour in ‘The Teares of the Muses’ 244 Conclusion 247 Chapter 7 St Paul’s Churchyard and the Meanings of Print: Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell 259 Nashe’s Mosaic of the Print Trade 266 Waste and Matter 274 The Figurative Authority of Print 280 Conclusion 282 Conclusion: Love and Loathing in Grub Street 289