On Demand Writing for the Market in Early Modern England

"The idea of the play as a marketable commodity and as a response to a growing consumer culture is . . . explored in a chapter on Troilus and Cressida from David J. Baker's excellent monograph, On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England. . . Baker's arguments are all valuable ones and his reading represents a fascinating and insightful contribution to scholarship on Troilus and Cressida."-Year's Work in English Studies "As the feudal world receded and the middle class got more and more powerful, The Renaissance took materialism and the commercial world increasingly to heart . . . David J. Baker in On Demand brilliantly demonstrates how new marked operations and entrenched moral principles interacted and were discussed."-Bibliotheque d'humanisme et renaissance "In addition to his careful and often nicely nuanced description of an emerging English market economy and the questions of habits and economic behaviors that accompany it, Baker is a detailed and insightful reader of the literature . . . It offers new ideas and questions on consumer practices; more importantly, it is likely to provoke new questions about social and economic conditions in early modern England and their representation in some important literary texts."-Barbara Correll, Renaissance Quarterly "Offering fresh readings of works both familiar and relatively unknown, Baker deftly weaves literary, historical, and economical threads together to create a cultural and literary pattern that is almost completely new . . . Highly recommended."-A. Castaldo, Choice "On Demand presents us with a fresh, lucid, and persuasive account of what it meant and what it felt like to live and to write at a transitional moment in English socio-economic history. It may well be the most nuanced analysis of this betwixt-and-between moment that we have been given to date."-Theodore Leinwand, University of Maryland "On Demand is a very astute and provocative work. It is more convincingly argued and thoroughly researched than most recent literary studies that invoke seventeenth-century economics, and it makes a significant contribution to our understanding of early modern literature and culture."-Robert Markley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign