Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England

Download or read book Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England written by Lori Humphrey Newcomb and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the proliferation of popular romances, their vilification by elite writers, and the ultimate opposition of "popular" and "literary" fiction. Using Robert Greene's "Pandosto" (1585), an Elizabethan prose romance that inspired Shakespeare's late play "The Winter's Tale" as a case study, Newcomb demonstrates that versions of the two texts repeatedly converge, resisting simple high/low division. Because Shakespeare's works are considered timeless literary achievements, critics have distanced his plays from their romance sources--a separation that until now has gone largely unquestioned. Newcomb challenges this assumption, providing a fascinating account of an early best-seller's incarnations over 250 years of literary history.