Dr. Ryan Netzley's (Professor, English) recent monograph,
Economies of Praise: Value, Labor, and Form in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, was published by Northwestern University Press in March, 2024. (From the publisher): In
Economies of Praise: Value, Labor, and Form in Seventeenth‑Century English Poetry, Ryan Netzley explores how poems of praise imagine alternatives to market and gift economies and point instead to a self-contained aesthetic economy that works against a more expansive and productivist understanding of literary art. By depicting exchange as inconsequential, unproductive, and redundant rather than a necessary constituent of social order, these poems model for modern readers a world without the imperative to create, appraise, and repeatedly demonstrate one’s own value.