Kemal Onur Toker

The idea that certain goods grow more abundant when shared—“the more I give to thee, the more I have”—was a recurrent motif in the works of Shakespeare and Milton. Although this motif has resurfaced in recent social scientific work on the sharing economy of the open-source software movement, it has not yet received any sustained scholarly attention that traces its literary genealogy or explicates its poetic import. In remedying this neglect, “The Poetics of the Sharing Economy” not only fills a significant gap in scholarship but also undertakes a critical reexamination of the fundamentally monetary model of cultural capital that has shaped various New Historicist and New Economic approaches to literary and cultural studies since the early 1980s.