Book Reviews

In ways that will seem familiar to scholars and students of book history, the argument of Stephen Orgel's most recent monograph insists on the materiality and historicity of literary texts and the priority of process over product in the conceptualization of literature.It insists on the irreducible importance of mediation, including in the printing house but also across time, in the shaping and reshaping of the text in light of what publishers, editors, and readers want the literary text, the literary author, and the literary itself to be.And it insists on the importance of reading, therefore, not only for the reception of texts (as if there were a fully stable origin subtending that reception) but also for the constitution of the text as such.Readers will notice also that, in his particular arguments, Orgel is revisiting topics that, over his long and distinguished career, he has made distinctively and decisively his own, including the always relational character of early modern genre; and the ways in which poems and plays participate in the cultural shaping of desire and relation along axes of sexual and gender difference as unsteady as desire itself; and the making of dramatic authorship as the relation among print and performance and the visual arts.Notable, too, is the fact that, even more particularly, this new monograph constitutes a bravura reflection on questions Orgel has been taking up in an outpouring of volumes across just the last decade: on the making of selves, often iconic selves, in textual, dramatic, and visual representation (Spectacular Performances, 2011);