English
St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Romance for Sale in Early Modern England:
The Rise of Prose Fiction
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing
Aldershot, Hampshire, United Kingdom
2006, 256 pages
English fiction self-consciously invented itself as a new form
of literary culture near the end of the 16th century, when
professional writers for the first time created books to be printed
and sold to anonymous readers. The period’s narrative innovations,
however, emerged not solely from changes in early modern culture
like the book market or print, but also from the rediscovery of a
forgotten classic of late antiquity, Heliodorus’s Aethiopian
History. This comprehensive historicist and formalist account
of early modern English prose romance situates the legacy of
Heliodorus and the achievements of early modern writers within the
larger narrative of prose fiction, thus connecting early modern
literary culture to the rise of the modern novel.
“This learned study offers important new contexts for the prose
romances…”
— William H. Sherman, University of York, UK