Performing Economic Thought
Performing Economic Thought
This introductory chapter presents an approach for analysing mercantile treatises and early English drama based on the work of Michel Serres and Bruno Latour. It compares this approach to new economic criticism, new historicism, and cognitive approaches to theatre. It summarises the book's argument that seventeenth-century mercantile treatises aspired to be transparent windows onto a world of objective truth, whereas plays showed totalising representations of economic activity to be self-evidently discursive constructs. Plays drew attention to the tension between framing and overflowing, between the aspects of the world internalised by particular representation of commerce and those aspects that appear as externalities. The author terms the array of techniques by which playwrights could use the stage to create and interrogate models of commercial activity in its systemic totality a ‘mercantile dramaturgy.’
Keywords: cognitive approaches to theatre, externalities, framing, new economic criticism, overflowing, Bruno Latour, new historicism, mercantile dramaturgy, mercantile treatises, Michel Serres
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.