Framing Elizabethan Fictions

Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose

Constance C. Relihan

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781612771243
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

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 often been seen as the work of "hack" writers, inelegant aberrations that demonstrated little about the culture of 16th-century Britain or the development of English fiction. This collection of original essays draws on a wide range of critical and theoretical approaches, especially those influenced by various elements of feminism, Marxism, and cultural studies. They illuminate the richness of canonical examples of Elizabethan fiction (Sidney's Arcadia ) and less widely read works (Henry Chettle's Piers Plainess ).

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Framing Elizabethan Fictions
• The Intersection of Poor Laws and Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Fictional and Factual Categories
• The Lady Frances Did Watch: Gascoigne’s Voyeuristic Narrative
• Making Men: Visions of Social Mobility in A Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure
• The Humanist in the Market: Gendering Exchange and Authorship in Lyly’s Euphues Romances
• Philoclea Parsed: Prose, Verse, and Femininity in Sidney’s Old Arcadia
• The Romance of Service: The Simple History of Pandosto’s Servant Readers
• Rhetoric, Gender, and Audience Construction in Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller
• Elizabethan Dreaming: Fictional Dreams from Gascoigne to Lodge
• Henry Chettle’s Piers Plainness: Seven Years’ Prenticeship: Contexts and Consumers
• Silenced Women
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index