Abstract
This chapter considers Sir Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia and its unusual place in English literary history. Arcadia is the most significant and substantial work of original prose fiction in English before Samuel Richardson; it contains around eighty poems in nearly four thousand lines of verse. Its author, Sir Philip Sidney, calls it only a ‘work’ and a ‘book’, and for his contemporaries that is all they can call it. This chapter, however, attempts to think of Arcadia as a novel. In doing so, it asks questions about its relation not only to its literary past, but to its literary future too, to register and measure the gap between what is novel about it and what is novelistic, to see that it is animated and finally incapacitated by its generic and formal combinations and minglings, by its wish to be all things to all people.
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