Various factors in late 16th-century England contributed to an environment more hospitable to prose fiction than had existed previously-among them, changes in educational opportunities, socioeconomic structures, literacy rates, and access to European literature. Such cultural alterations inevitably produced changes in modes of literary production. Furthermore, access to the bookstall to a new class of readers altered the structures and subjects writers employed. Within this tumultuous context, the writers of fictional prose narrative negotiated-for themselves and their audience a precarious...

Literary historians have been giving increased attention to texts that have hitherto been largely ignored. The works of women, the disenfranchised, and "commoners" have all benefited from such critical analysis. Similarly, letters, memoirs, popular poetry, and serialized fiction have become the subject of scholarly inquiry. Elizabethan fiction has also profited from the newer odes of critical inquiry. Such texts as George Gascoigne's The Adventurers of Master F.J., John Lyly's Euphues, George Pettie's A Petite Palace of Pettie his Pleasure, or Nicolas Breton's The Miseries of Mavilla have...

A fresh perspective on Elizabethan fiction

In Cosmographical Glasses Constance Relihan examines the ways in which sixteenth-century English texts--traveler's reports, ethnographic studies, and geographic guides--provide the foundation for how fictional prose of the period envisions the locations in which its tales are set. Relihan suggests that this nonfictional discourse becomes central to how the fictional prose of the period imagines cultural identity, fictional purpose, and gender identity.

Places and cultures were defined in opposition to each other in...

This book brings together twelve new essays which situate the arguments about the multiple constructions of sexualities in prose fiction within contemporary critical and theoretical debates about the body, desire, gender, print and manuscript culture, postcoloniality, and cultural geography. Looking at Sidney's Arcadia, Wroth's Urania, Lyly's Euphues; fictions by Gascoigne, Riche, Parry, Johnson, and Brathwaite; as well as Hellenic romances, rogue fictions, and novelle, the essays expand and challenge current critical arguments about early modern sexualities, the gendering of labor, female...

This book brings together twelve new essays which situate the arguments about the multiple constructions of sexualities in prose fiction within contemporary critical and theoretical debates about the body, desire, gender, print and manuscript culture, postcoloniality, and cultural geography.