Romance for Sale in Early Modern England

Romance for Sale in Early Modern England PDF Author: Steve Mentz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351902601
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The major claim made by this study is that early modern English prose fiction self-consciously invented a new form of literary culture in which professional writers created books to be printed and sold to anonymous readers. It further claims that this period's narrative innovations emerged not solely from changes in early modern culture like print and the book market, but also from the rediscovery of a forgotten late classical text from North Africa, Heliodorus's Aethiopian History. In making these claims, Steve Mentz provides a comprehensive historicist and formalist account of prose romance, the most important genre of Elizabethan fiction. He explores how authors and publishers of prose fiction in late sixteenth-century England produced books that combined traditional narrative forms with a dynamic new understanding of the relationship between text and audience. Though prose fiction would not dominate English literary culture until the eighteenth century, Mentz demonstrates that the form began to invent itself as a distinct literary kind in England nearly two centuries earlier. Examining the divergent but interlocking careers of Robert Greene, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Nashe, Mentz traces how through differing commitments to print culture and their respective engagements with Heliodoran romance, these authors helped make the genre of prose fiction culturally and economically viable in England. Mentz explores how the advent of print and the book market changed literary discourse, influencing new conceptions of what he calls 'middlebrow' narrative and new habits of reading and writing. This study draws together three important strains of current scholarly inquiry: the history of the book and print culture, the study of popular fiction, and the re-examination of genre and influence. It also connects early modern fiction with longer histories of prose fiction and the rise of the modern novel.

Romance for Sale in Early Modern England

Romance for Sale in Early Modern England PDF Author: Steve Mentz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351902601
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
The major claim made by this study is that early modern English prose fiction self-consciously invented a new form of literary culture in which professional writers created books to be printed and sold to anonymous readers. It further claims that this period's narrative innovations emerged not solely from changes in early modern culture like print and the book market, but also from the rediscovery of a forgotten late classical text from North Africa, Heliodorus's Aethiopian History. In making these claims, Steve Mentz provides a comprehensive historicist and formalist account of prose romance, the most important genre of Elizabethan fiction. He explores how authors and publishers of prose fiction in late sixteenth-century England produced books that combined traditional narrative forms with a dynamic new understanding of the relationship between text and audience. Though prose fiction would not dominate English literary culture until the eighteenth century, Mentz demonstrates that the form began to invent itself as a distinct literary kind in England nearly two centuries earlier. Examining the divergent but interlocking careers of Robert Greene, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Nashe, Mentz traces how through differing commitments to print culture and their respective engagements with Heliodoran romance, these authors helped make the genre of prose fiction culturally and economically viable in England. Mentz explores how the advent of print and the book market changed literary discourse, influencing new conceptions of what he calls 'middlebrow' narrative and new habits of reading and writing. This study draws together three important strains of current scholarly inquiry: the history of the book and print culture, the study of popular fiction, and the re-examination of genre and influence. It also connects early modern fiction with longer histories of prose fiction and the rise of the modern novel.

Romance for Sale in Early Modern England

Romance for Sale in Early Modern England PDF Author: Steve Mentz
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754654698
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Steve Mentz provides a comprehensive historicist and formalist account of prose romance, the most important genre of Elizabethan fiction. He explores how authors and publishers of prose fiction in late sixteenth-century England produced books that combined traditional narrative forms with a dynamic new understanding of the relationship between text and audience. Though prose fiction would not dominate English literary culture until the eighteenth century, Mentz demonstrates that the form began to invent itself as a distinct literary kind in England nearly two centuries earlier.

The Immaterial Book

The Immaterial Book PDF Author: Sarah Wall-Randell
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472118773
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
In romances—Renaissance England’s version of the fantasy novel—characters often discover books that turn out to be magical or prophetic, and to offer insights into their readers’ selves. The Immaterial Book examines scenes of reading in important romance texts across genres: Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and The Tempest, Wroth’s Urania, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It offers a response to “material book studies” by calling for a new focus on imaginary or “immaterial” books and argues that early modern romance authors, rather than replicating contemporary reading practices within their texts, are reviving ancient and medieval ideas of the book as a conceptual framework, which they use to investigate urgent, new ideas about the self and the self-conscious mind.

The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England

The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England PDF Author: Elizabeth Rivlin
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810127814
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
In The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England, Elizabeth Rivlin explores the ways in which servant-master relationships reshaped literature. The early modern servant is enjoined to obey his or her master out of dutiful love, but the servant's duty actually amounts to standing in for the master, a move that opens the possibility of becoming master. Rivlin shows that service is fundamentally a representational practice, in which the servant who acts for a master merges with the servant who acts as a master. Rivlin argues that in the early modern period, servants found new positions as subjects and authors found new forms of literature. Representations of servants and masters became a site of contact between pressing material concerns and evolving aesthetic ones. Offering readings of dramas by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Thomas Dekker and prose fictions by Thomas Deloney and Thomas Nashe, Rivlin suggests that these authors discovered their own exciting and unstable projects in the servants they created.

Seventeenth-century Fiction

Seventeenth-century Fiction PDF Author: Jacqueline L. Glomski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198737262
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
A multi-authored study of the emergence and transmission of fictional writing in Europe in the seventeenth century, with the aim of improving understanding of the origins of the novel.

Narrative Structure and Reader Formation in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania

Narrative Structure and Reader Formation in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania PDF Author: Rahel Orgis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317090497
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Narrative Structure and Reader Formation in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania offers the first systematic formal and thematic analysis of Wroth’s Urania in its historical context and explores the structural means by which Wroth fashions her readership. The book thus has a dual focus, at once on narrative art and reader formation. It makes two original claims, the first being that the Urania is not the unorganized accumulation of stories critics have tended to present it as, but a work of sophisticated narrative structures i.e. a complex text in a positive sense. These structures are revealed by means of a circumspect narratological analysis of the formal and thematic patterns that organise the Urania. Such an analysis furthers our understanding of the reading strategies that Wroth encourages. The second claim is, then, that through the careful structuring of her text Wroth seeks to create her own ideal readership. More precisely, the formal and thematic structures of the Urania engage with readers’ expectations, inviting them to reflect on prominent thematic issues and respond to the text as what early modern prefaces term "good" readers. Combining narratological methods with a generic perspective and taking into account the work of book historians on early modern reading practices, this monograph provides a new approach to the Urania, supplementing the typically gender- or (auto)biographically-oriented interpretations of the romance. Moreover, it contributes to the study of early modern (prose) narrative and romance and exemplifies how historically contextualised narratological analysis may yield new insights and profit research on reading strategies.

Narrative Developments from Chaucer to Defoe

Narrative Developments from Chaucer to Defoe PDF Author: Gerd Bayer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136821252
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book analyzes how narrative technique developed from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the eighteenth-century. The contributors address issues such as subjectivity, performance, voice, narrative time, character development and genre, placing their readings of early modern prose texts within the diachronic frame of the overall topic. Individual chapters will treat texts from a variety of genres, offering analyses of individual texts in the context of changes and developments within literary forms. The book in its entirety will cover a period of approximately 350 years, from 1370 to 1720.

Thomas Lodge

Thomas Lodge PDF Author: Charles C. Whitney
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351879073
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Book Description
Thomas Lodge was the most versatile of the pioneering professional writers of the English Renaissance, experimenting in an astonishing variety of forms. His long, eventful, and well-documented life makes him one of the most individualized figures of his age, and yet also one of the most representative. This is the first-ever collection of Lodge scholarship. It comprises a selection of the best and most important biographical and critical work, ranging from 1932 to 2008 and including first-time English translations. Charles Whitney's discerning introduction discusses each article or book chapter in the context of Lodge scholarship and beyond, and is supplemented by a bibliography of additional material. This unique collection offers a distinctive vantage on both Lodge and many current topics in Renaissance and early modern studies such as humanism, republicanism, romance, intertextuality, plagiarism, gender, colonization, Shakespearean sources, the histories of print and of reading, authorship, and English Catholicism and religious conflict.

Iberian Chivalric Romance

Iberian Chivalric Romance PDF Author: Leticia Alvarez Recio
Publisher:
ISBN: 1487539002
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
"This collection of original essays examines the publication and reception history of sixteenth-century Iberian books of chivalry in English translation and explores the impact of that literary corpus on Elizabethan culture as well as its connections with other contemporary genres such as native English fiction, chronicle, and epistolary writing. The essays focus mainly on Anthony Munday's work as the leading translator as well as the two main Spanish sixteenth-century cycles-Le., Amadis and Palmerin-from a variety of critical approaches, including cultural studies, book history and reception, material history, translation, post-colonial criticism, and early modern Qender studies."--

The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, 3 Volume Set

The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, 3 Volume Set PDF Author: Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405194499
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1335

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Book Description
Featuring entries composed by leading international scholars, The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature presents comprehensive coverage of all aspects of English literature produced from the early 16th to the mid 17th centuries. Comprises over 400 entries ranging from 1000 to 5000 words written by leading international scholars Arranged in A-Z format across three fully indexed and cross-referenced volumes Provides coverage of canonical authors and their works, as well as a variety of previously under-considered areas, including women writers, broadside ballads, commonplace books, and other popular literary forms Biographical material on authors is presented in the context of cutting-edge critical discussion of literary works. Represents the most comprehensive resource available for those working in English Renaissance literary studies Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities