Julianne Werlin's new monograph unites two rarely combined areas of early modern literary criticism that make a wonderfully productive pair: Marxist literary history and the study of material texts’ production and circulation. Combining these approaches allows Werlin to take, by turns, a zoomed-out view of domestic and international economic expansion and a more granular, close-up view of particular areas of literary production—or rather, as the title has it, of “writing.” Analyzing deeds, licenses, diaries, and accounts as well as ballads, plays, poems, and literary prose, Werlin persuasively makes the case that the kinds of writing demanded by an expanding economy ultimately reshaped England's literary landscape. Linking premodern financial writing to emerging literary forms like the realist novel, Werlin's work joins that of Mary Poovey, who similarly traces the interplay of monetary objects and documents with imaginative literature across period boundaries.
Rather than centering its narrative on a single link between...
