A study of the eccentric literary landscape that emerged in England in the roughly two hundred years after the rise of print that introduces a new theory of early modern poetics

Although the compilers of Shakespeare’s First Folio address their work “to the great Variety of Readers,” the new history of reading has recovered great varieties within those readers. They read serially, discontinuously, and even spatially around the page; they read silently and aloud, in bed and at their desks, with pens in hand and with other books on their minds. Their reading was, as it remains today, a dynamic and variable enterprise. Now, after several centuries in which reading has come to mean getting lost in a novel, we are experiencing a digital revolution so sweeping it is comparable only to the explosion of print in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And we are once again thinking in earnest about how we read.

The Kinetic Text revisits the eccentric literary landscape that emerged in England in the roughly two hundred years after the rise of print in order to introduce a new theory of early modern poetics centered on the expressive potential of the material text. During a moment of extraordinary literary innovation, one in which print books harbored everything from idiosyncratic spelling to upside-down pages, readers encountered literary experiments from Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, George Herbert, and other writers in a medium that offered rich possibilities for creative interpretation. Jessica C. Beckman reveals how these works create kinetic metaphors that harness the dynamism of that reading to create dramatic literary effects. In doing so, she shows how literature across time and place transforms curiosity, inattention, and inconstancy into its own kind of poetry.