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In the wake of the 1688 revolution, England’s transition to financial capitalism accelerated dramatically. Londoners witnessed the rise of credit-based currencies, securities markets, speculative bubbles, insurance schemes, and lotteries. Many understood these phenomena in terms shaped by their experience with another risky venture at the heart of London life: the public theater. Speculative Enterprise traces the links these observers drew between the operations of Drury Lane and Exchange Alley, including their hypercommercialism, dependence on collective opinion, and accessibility to people of different classes and genders. Mattie Burkert identifies a discursive "theater-finance nexus" at work in plays by Colley Cibber, Richard Steele, and Susanna Centlivre as well as in the vibrant eighteenth-century media landscape. As Burkert demonstrates, the stock market and the entertainment industry were recognized as deeply interconnected institutions that, when considered together, illuminated the nature of the public more broadly and gave rise to new modes of publicity and resistance. In telling this story, Speculative Enterprise combines methods from literary studies, theater and performance history, media theory, and work on print and material culture to provide a fresh understanding of the centrality of theater to public life in eighteenth-century London.
Modernism was an aesthetic project introduced as being the single frame of mind necessary to impersonate modernity’s best invention – the scientific method – which would cure the various sicknesses derived from rampant urbanization. Therefore, it is not surprising that modernism has often been confused with modernity, which is actually a project spanning 500 years. The anthology gathers a body of notes conrad-bercah has been peeling for over twenty years about some of the cultural issues reflected in American modernism and its discontents. The material has gained an ‘archaeological’ interest for the author who aims at stimulating the reader to interact with the prevailing rhetoric of the day: a relentless techno-fetishism to mask an irreversible submission to market forces that thrive on making a marketable spectacle of architectural form either by resorting to specious naturalism or deviated engineering. Or both.