The Culture of Capital | Henry S. Turner

Henry S. Turner

research, publications, teaching

The Culture of Capital

The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). The Culture of Capital brings together thirteen literary critics and historians to examine the problem of “capital” as both a linguistic artifact that must be traced through contracts, archives, dictionaries, or literary texts and as a historical phenomenon that requires a critical understanding of institutions, people, and power. The essays engage the birth of private property and the rise of cities, the appearance of the printed book, and the claims of modern science. The contributors explore the nuanced relationships among economic value and other forms of religious, cultural, political, and intellectual value, as well as the persistence of objects, activities, and concepts that resisted becoming “capital” in a modern sense.

Reviews

Richard Cunningham, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 34.2 (2007): 214-19.

Alan Shepard, The Sixteenth Century Journal 36 (2005): 609-11

Fritz Levy, Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004): 330-31

Nicole Greenspan, Seventeenth Century News 62.1-2 (2004): 40-44.

Biography
- About Me
Current Research
My primary research and teaching areas are in Renaissance Drama, especially William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, in critical theory and philosophy, and in early modern intellectual history, especially literary theory and early scientific thought, the history of political economy, law, colonization, and the State, cartography, and theories of space in early modern mathematics, poetry, and theater.

I am currently writing a book with Jane Hwang Degenhardt (U-Mass, Amherst) on early modern notions of the "world," especially as viewed through Shakespeare's plays, tentatively entitled "The Shakespearean Horizon," as well as related projects on theorizing fiction in the early modern period and on Shakespeare, "art," experience, and cosmology. I recently edited Ben Jonson's Poetaster for the Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, ed. Jeremy Lopez.

Along with Mary Thomas Crane, I edit a book series entitled Alembics: Penn Studies in Literature and Science (Penn Press). The series publishes books on all aspects of literature and science from the medieval to the contemporary periods. Visit the link to find out more about the series or about how to submit a proposal.

At Rutgers I am the Vice President for Academic Initiatives and former Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis. At the CCA I coordinate EMRG @ RU: The Early Modern Research Group at Rutgers, which sponsors talks, colloquia, and other forms of intellectual exchange on all aspects of the period 1500-1700. I am also a member of the Race and the Early Modern World Working Group at the CCA and of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Colloquium, an English Department faculty-graduate student research group.

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