During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries markets expanded globally, transactions increased, and the circulation of capital accelerated. This new situation, that created an unprecedented concern with the nature of money (in different forms: bullion, coins, bills of payment, and promissory notes) and with economic concepts (inflation, interest, usury), made its way into all sorts of literary texts and cultural artefacts: plays, poems, pamphlets, or emblems, among others. People started to suspect that money, commercial exchanges, and economic transactions at large were becoming mysteriously free from bedrock referents (fixed value, fair prices) in order to be subjected to uncertain and fluctuating social rituals and conventions. Like language, prone to different uses, the proto-economic discourse emerging during this period emphasized the protean, changing, nature of all things related with money. Francis Bacon seemed to hint that much when in The Advancement of Learning (1605) he made explicit this homology between language and economics, between meaning and value: “words are the tokens current and accepted for conceits, as moneys are for values.” The epistemological link between words and coins, just like the insinuation of economic language (use, payback, debt) into literary and artistic discourses of love, procreation, eroticism or revenge, was becoming apparent as the networks of financial obligations and human subordination to what Marx and Engels once called “the icy waters of egotistical calculation” became irresistibly stronger. Hence the striking pervasiveness of financial and commercial terminology in lyrical, tragic and comic texts during the Early Modern period and the Restoration.

The New Economic Criticism examines literary and cultural texts that negotiate ambivalent and often contradictory notions of value, profit and creditworthiness at a time when the modern sense of the “economy” and the concomitant discourse of “economic theory” were still in the making. The pioneering works of Marc Shell, David Hawkes, John Drakakis and Linda Woodbridge (or Elvira Vilches for Spanish New World Gold) have set the pace for these studies. They, from a diversity of insightful approaches, have addressed the different ways in which literary texts and cultural artefacts at large articulate one of the most important epistemological changes that the period witnessed, ie, the so-called new economy.

Contributions to this issue may consider, among other potentially relevant topics.

• The various ways in which economic tropes rhetorically conform the formal aspects of Early Modern and Restoration texts
• The material/economic conditions of the (re)production of sixteenth and seventeenth century literary and cultural texts and artefacts: printing, performing, patronage etc.
• Economic concerns as the explicit subject matter in Early Modern and Restoration texts: usury and money-lending for profit, the price theory, debasement, gold and the dichotomy worth vs value, use and excess etc.

 Comparative studies between English and other literary and cultural traditions (Spanish, French, Italian…), and also involving different genres and cultural artefacts (poetry and pamphlets, emblems and plays, etc) are strongly encouraged.

For this special issue of the Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (April 2027) we welcome proposals of up to 800 words for full essays of 6,000 to 10,000 words. These 800-word proposals should be sent to the guest editor, Jesús López-Peláez Casellas, by 1 September 2025 (jlopez@ujaen.es), together with a short (150 w) vita. Selected authors will be asked to submit the full-length text, in accordance to the journal guidelines, by 1 June 2026.

Inquiries regarding this CFP can be sent to the guest editor.