:Framing Elizabethan Fictions. Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose

Abstract

Literary historians have been giving increased attention to texts that have hitherto been largely ignored. works of women, the disenfranchised, and commoners have all benefitted 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 modes of critical inquiry. Such texts as George Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F.J., John Lyly's Euphues, George Pettie's A Petite Palace of Pettie his Pleasure, or Nicholas 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).