| dc.description.abstract | This essay argues that the Elizabethan author Thomas Nashe’s
(1567–1601) erotic poem »The Choise of Valentines« explores
early modern senses of distinction between manuscript writing
and print. In his dedication and in subsequent responses to
critique against the poem, Nashe invokes a sense of intimacy
with his patron and his audience – an intimacy that is associated
in his texts with manuscript writing but is enacted by
references to, and directly in, the medium of print. In other
words, »The Choise of Valentines« constructs a fiction of privacy
that is rhetorically and commercially exploited in the medium
of print – which is, in turn, constructed as the public opposite
of the intimate, private medium of manuscript writing. | sv |
