Romance for Sale in Early Modern England

Download or read book Romance for Sale in Early Modern England written by Steve Mentz and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.