ABSTRACT
IN PREVIOUS CHAPTERS I have noted that subcultures are, among other things, a matter of imaginative representation. In even those disciplines where one might most expect description to be driven by realistic imperatives – sociology, for example – we fi nd instead a host of tropes and metaphors, as if it is impossible to account for subcultures without them. Subcultures are brought into being through narration and narrative: told by the participants themselves, as well as by those who document them, monitor them, ‘label’ them, outlaw them, and so on. It therefore makes sense to look at subcultures in terms of their relation to print culture, and in particular, literary culture. As I had suggested at the beginning of Chapter 1, the notion of an ‘Elizabethan underworld’ in sixteenth-century England was itself caught up with literary representation: the result of a set of sometimes hyperbolic literary eff ects involving the imaginative (and no doubt often imaginary) representation of marginal and troublesome social types. We have seen a few other examples of literary hyperbole in descriptions of subcultures, too, like John Dunton’s poem about mollies and club life presented in Chapter 3: ‘excessive’ representations of ‘excessive’ subcultural practices. If the subculture is itself involved in literary production as a way of expressing its own predicament – and accounting for the world around it – then hyperbole and excess can sometimes come to seem utterly defi nitive. A striking example can be found during the midseventeenth century in a subculture whose very name connotes hyperbole and excess, the Ranters.
