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For the last three decades or so, literary studies, especially those dealing with premodern texts, have been dominated by the New Historicist paradigm. This book is a collection of essays explores medieval and early modern Troilus-texts from Chaucer to Shakespeare. The contributions show how medieval and early modern fictions of Troy use love and other emotions as a means of approaching the problem of tradition. The book argues that by emphasizing Troilus's and Cressida's hopes and fears, Shakespeare sets in motion a triangle of narrative, emotion and temporality. It is a spectacle of which tells something about the play but also about the relation between anticipatory emotion and temporality. The sense of multiple literary futures is shaped by Shakespeare's Chaucer, and in particular by Troilus and Criseyde. The book argues that the play's attempted violence upon a prototypical form of historical time is in part an attack on the literary narratives. Criseyde's beauty is described many times. The characters' predilection for sententiousness unfolds gradually. Through Criseyde, Chaucer's Poet displaces authorial humility as arrogance. The Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida saga begins with Boccaccio, who isolates and expands the love affair between Troiolo and Criseida to vent his sexual frustration. The poem appears to be linking an awareness of history and its continuing influence and impact on the present to hermeneutical acts conspicuously gendered female. The main late medieval Troy tradition does two things: it represents ferocious military combat, and also practises ferocious literary combat against other, competing traditions of Troy.
Novel horizons analyses how narrative prose fiction developed during the English Restoration. It argues that following the reopening of the theatres in 1660, generic changes within dramatic texts occasioned an intense debate within prologues and introductions. This discussion about the poetics of a genre was echoed in the paratextual material of prose fictions: in trans¬lators’ introductions, authorial prefaces, and other accompanying material. In the absence of an official poetics that defined prose fiction, paratexts ful¬filled this function and informed readers about the changing features of the budding genre. This study traces the piecemeal development of these generic boundaries and describes the generic competence of readers through the detailed analysis of paratexts and actual narrative prose fictions. Rather than trying to canonize individual Restoration novels, Novel horizons covers the surviving textual material widely, focusing on narrative prose fictions published between 1660 and 1710. Drawing on genre theories by Jacques Derrida and M.M. Bakhtin, the study follows an approach to genre that sees a textual corpus as an archive that projects into the future, thereby enabling later readers and writers to experiment with forms and themes. In addition to tracing the paratextual poetics of Restoration fiction, a substantial section of this book covers the state of the art of fiction-writing during the period. It discusses aspects such as character development, narrative point of view, and questions of fictionality and realism in order to describe how these features were first used in popular fiction at the time.
as Ned Ward’s London Spy (1698–1700). The very medium of print, and the lack of intimacy between speaker and listener that it created, placed a heavy burden on the authors of early modern fiction, who had to work in a discursive environment that, in Ingo Berensmeyer’s perceptive analysis, was largely ‘depersonalised’.6 They surely experienced as painful the fact, as pointed out by Walter Ong, that speech traditionally connects to sound, and that sound itself is a prerogative of living beings. Or, as he put it rather inimitably: ‘Sound exists only when it is going
This was reading-matter bought for immediate consumption. These books were not bought to adorn the bookshelves of private libraries; they were read for pleasure, handed on to friends, and then gradually, and in varying degrees of wear and tear, finally thrown out. A score of authors, many of whose names are today largely unfamiliar even to scholars of early modern fiction, were for decades very popular with English readers. As has long been recognised, and most significantly since the pioneering work of Ros Ballaster, English women writers drew on this fiction and
to grave, allowing the author to paint a detailed picture of the maturation and development of a Restoration woman. The novel’s protagonist takes shape to an extent that is rarely found in narrative prose fiction at the time and may qualify for the title of first female Bildungsroman if it were not for 182 The Restoration novel the protagonist’s utter lack of intellectual education or even interest. Yet the development of the eponymous professional woman clearly goes beyond the kind of flat and one-dimensional character usually found in early modern fiction.47
that Sappho was a ‘pervert’. 6 George Klawitter, The Enigmatic Narrator: The Voicing of Same-Sex Love in the Poetry of John Donne (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 47–61. 7 Maria Prendergast, Renaissance Fantasies: The Gendering of Aesthetics in Early Modern Fiction (Kent
that the story does not relate to the readers’ own social circumstances but insists it is from Rome.119 The question over truth forms a central concern in the author’s engagement with the work’s readers: ‘In the mean time I wou’d have them rest satisfied the whole Story is a Fiction, that there is no such Country in the World as Albigion, nor any such person now Living, or ever was, as Zarah, or the other Names Characteris’d, either in This or the First Part.’120 The whole project of early modern fiction appeared to have benefited, in the minds of both authors and
Possession of large amounts of money and property, rich clothes, horses and coaches, in short, the lifestyle of great men and women, are features of the narratives and manifest the fascination of contemporaries. The ‘ability to consume conspicuously’ was regarded as one of the distinctive attributes of the better sort.52 As Craig Muldrew states, the ‘social meaning of money and the morality of its use was an enormously popular trope in early modern fiction’.53 The Morrell narratives display this fascination and the desire to be part of the richer sector of society – the