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This book discusses the extent of John Lyly's importance for early modern authorship in three parts: prose fiction, drama and reception. The first two parts study Lyly's impact on early modern culture, focusing on prose fiction and drama respectively. In each part, the first chapter assesses Lyly's originality and the second chapter assesses the impact of that authorship upon the print market for each of those literary forms. These two parts demonstrate how Lyly's work was innovative and was received and commodified by his contemporaries. The third part of the book examines Lyly's reception history up to the present day, focusing on nineteenth-century uses of the word euphuism as part of a debate over appropriate literary male style. The dynamic relationship between performance and text creates the market for two basic kinds of English literature: printed single-story fiction and printed drama. Lyly's dramaturgical stories are as elusive and protean as his prose fiction. At the same time that his character Euphues was being reworked and commodified by print writers and publishers, Lyly reworked and innovated ways to create fictional worlds and characters in the theatre.
This book offers a comprehensive account of the absurd in prose fiction. As well as providing a basis for courses on absurdist literature (whether in fiction or in drama), it offers a broadly based philosophical background. Sections covering theoretical approaches and an overview of the historical literary antecedents to the ‘modern’ absurd introduce the largely twentieth-century core chapters. In addition to discussing a variety of literary movements (from Surrealism to the Russian OBERIU), the book offers detailed case studies of four prominent exponents of the absurd: Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Daniil Kharms and Flann O'Brien. There is also wide discussion of other English-language and European contributors to the phenomenon of the absurd.
This book constructs a vocabulary for the literary study of graphic textual phenomena. It examines the typographic devices within a very particular context: that of the interpretation of prose fiction. The graphic surface of the page is a free two-dimensional space on which text appears either mechanically or consciously. As visual arrangements of printed text on the graphic surface, graphic devices can contribute to the process of reading, combining with the semantic content within the context which that text creates. The book first sets out to demonstrate both how and why the graphic surface has been neglected. It looks at the perception of the graphic surface during reading and how it may be obscured by other concerns or automatised until unnoticed. Then, the book examines some critical assumptions about the transformation of manuscript to novel and what our familiarity with the printed form of the book leads us to take for granted. It looks at theoretical approaches to the graphic surface, particularly those which see printed text as either an idealised sign-system or a representation of spoken language. The book further looks at how 'blindness' to the graphic surface, and particularly its mimetic usage, is reflected and perpetuated in literary criticism. It deals with the work of specific authors, their texts and the relevant critical background, before providing a concluding summary which touches on some of the implications of these analyses.
This article proposes that the popularly held model of ‘Gothic’ writings emergence in the Eighteenth Century is too partial: it tends to privilege prose fiction written in England in the latter part of the century. As a corrective, the article looks at poetry written in Scotland across the century, seeking not origins for ‘the Gothic’ as a transhistorical literary mode of expression, but emergent treatments of the supernatural that fed back into the literature of the period. It argues that poetry in eighteenth-century Scotland develops well-established indigenous supernatural tropes, especially that of the ‘ghaist’ or ghost.
nascent markets for prose fiction and drama intersected. In the latter discussion, particular emphasis is placed on the way prose fiction writers responded to changes in theatre culture – in particular, the predominance of a smaller number of theatre companies in London from 1583 – by incorporating characters from the stage within their prose stories. Thus this chapter builds on
’s discursive intrusion into Tudor storytelling culture, however, and to move beyond this emphasis on static dialogue. Evidence in his plays and prose fiction suggests a greater engagement with plot and its emotive possibilities than Hunter suggests. In three of his first four plays, Lyly staged a tableau in which one character tells a story to another, pausing the present tense of the drama in order
3 The narratiaves of ‘I’ Johnno The first three long prose fictions of Malouf’s career, beginning with Johnno, are narrated in the first person. Only the first one, however, is strongly marked by Malouf’s personal experience and history. Ovid, the first-person narrator of the second novel, is like Malouf a writer, and more particularly a poet; like Malouf and other Australians, Ovid undergoes a complex experience of exile. Yet Malouf’s creation of Ovid nonetheless demonstrates impressive imaginative stretch, so distantly does the Roman poet’s experience stand
5 Paratext and prose The paratextual poetics that dominate Restoration prose fiction echoes in many ways the situation described in the previous chapter with respect to the theatre. In both generic contexts, the sudden and substantial rupture in the social and political sphere was followed by a period of active experimentation that was accompanied by an informal discussion. This discussion only rarely led to the kind of substantiated and complex debate of contrasting features within novelistic and romance writing that makes of the preface to Congreve
an almost ideal or archetypal test case for the notion that the cultural and social environment substantially shapes literary representations. One may ask how, in the aftermath of such drastic political changes, artists could possibly have gone on producing work in formats that had already been around before the revolution. The seventeenth century certainly saw its ups and downs when it comes to the history of narrative prose fiction. The genre’s situation at the time was anything but clear, but the genre was to be the net winner when the dust settled. Not that the
itself. He created a kind of prose fiction that was not only new but came to define the shape the future novel was to take. He was the first professional Elizabethan playwright to see a succession of plays into print. He created characters, phrases and literary forms that dominated contemporary writing. He deserves more space in these debates than he has so far been given. Early modern literary culture was defined