Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives - Rilegato

Maslen, R. W.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0198119917 ISBN 13: 9780198119913

Casa editrice: Clarendon Press, 1997

Riassunto

In Elizabethan Fictions, Robert Maslen argues that English writers of prose fiction from the 1550s to the 15570s produced some of the most daringly innovative publications of the sixteenth century. Through close examination of a number of key texts, from William Baldwin's satircal fable Beware the Cat to George Gascoigne's mock-romance he Adventures of Master F.J. and John Lyly's immensely popular Euphues books, he sets out to demonstrate the courage as well as the considerable skills which these undervalued authors brought to their work. They wrote at a time when the Elizabethan censorship system was growing increasingly rigorous in response to the perceived threat of infiltration from Catholic Europe, yet they chose to write books of a kind that was specifically associated with Catholic Italy and France. Their topics were the secrets, lies, and acts of petty treason which vitiated the private lives of the contemporary ruling classes, and their vigorous experiments with style and form marked out prose fiction for years to come as shifty and perilous literary territory. These writers presented themselves as masters of the arts of duplicity, whose talents made them emminently suitable for employment as informers or spies, whether for the government or for its most deadly ideological opponents. Their sophisticated narratives of sexual intrigue had a profound effect on the development of the complex poetry and drama which sprung up towards the end of the century, as well as of the modern novel. This book provides a much-needed reappraisal of their achievements.

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Recensione

insightful commentaries on the early 'novel', its antecedents, contextual resonances, generic fluidity, and later development ... With vigour and felicity, the author demonstrates the ways in which the 'book' in sixteenth-century England could embrace a wealth of dangerous topical reference ... a thoroughly worthwhile, impressive, and innovative book, which looks sure to establish itself as a leader in the field. (Mark Thornton Burnett, YES, 30, 1999)

Well argued, thoroughly presented, and highly detailed... a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on Elizabethan fiction. (Journal of English and Germanic Philology)

Contenuti

• Introduction: Monstrous Imaginations
• 1: The Fiction of Simplicity in the Sixteenth-Century Treatise
• 2: Fictions and their Commentaries before 1570
• 3: George Gascoigne and the Fiction of Failure
• 4: George Pettie, Gender, and the Generation Gap
• 5: The Dissolution of Euphues
• 6: The Resolution of Euphues
• Conclusion: Hideous Progeny
• Bibliography

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Clarendon Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 1997
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0198119917
• ISBN 13: 9780198119913
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 336
• Contatto del produttore: Messaggerie Libri; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8.; Assago Milano; 20090; Italia