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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | Selfish Gifts: The Politics of Exchange and English Courtly Literarture, 1580-1628
ISBN# 0838640826
Reviewed by: Lorna G. Barrow, The University of Sydney
Parergon 27.1 (2010) |
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Alison Scott has written a most scholarly and interesting book on gift exchange and its relationship to the literature and politics of patronage in the late English Renaissance. This work is useful to researchers in a range of disciplines including anthropology and history, but it is of greatest use to scholars in English Literature of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. It is particularly helpful to those concentrating on Shakespearean themes but is by no means limited to the Bard's work: Ben Johnson, John Donne, Samuel Daniel, and Philip Sydney are also discussed among others.
This work, the outcome of Scott's PhD, has been rigorously researched. The book comprises six very densely written chapters, which are divided by several subheadings. The end notes are comprehensive. The introduction is reasonably long at 43 pages. This is necessary, as it sets out the complexities of gift-exchange theories in general, and more specifically, in relation to how they apply to the book's content. If one is unfamiliar with gift-exchange theory then it is absolutely essential to read the introduction carefully to get the most value out of this very well written book.
This is a book for serious scholars of Early Modern English Literature, anthropology, history, and politics. It deserves to be in all university libraries.
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