With the expansion of the publishing industry between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, reading for pleasure became possible for an increasing number of p

Steve Mentz provides a comprehensive historicist and formalist account of prose romance, the most important genre of Elizabethan fiction. He explores how author

This volume examines the proliferation of popular romances, their vilification by elite writers, and the ultimate opposition of "popular" and "literary" fiction

The major claim made by this study is that early modern English prose fiction self-consciously invented a new form of literary culture in which professional wri

A study of the representation of reading in early modern Englishwomen's writing, this book exists at the intersection of textual criticism and cultural history.