Corporate Culture: National and Transnational Corporations in Seventeenth-Century Literature

شرکت - جمعی جاودانه که ملزم به فعالیت برای منافع عمومی است - در قرن هفدهم ایجاد شد، اما توجه نسبتاً کمی به پیامدهای ادبی آن شده است. این اثر تاریخ شرکت را با تجزیه و تحلیل ادبی ترکیب می‌کند تا نشان دهد چگونه شرکت‌ها و ادبیاتی که آنها پدید آورده‌اند، ایده‌های حوزه عمومی، اعتماد، اخلاق تجارت و مبادله، هویت ملی و نجات را شکل داده است.

The corporation – an immortal collective bound to act for the common good – was developed in the seventeenth century, but comparatively little attention has been paid to its literary ramifications. This work combines corporate history with literary analysis to demonstrate how corporations, and the literature they engendered, shaped ideas of the public sphere, trust, the morality of trade and exchange, national identity, and salvation.

Drawing on a wide range of genres – including corporate publications, letters, and minute books; dramatic works; epic poetry and sermons – this study shows how widely corporate rhetoric spread, and how embedded it was in the early modern social imagination.