Product Description

These five works - George Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F. J; John Lyly's Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit; Robert Greene's Pandosto. The Triumph of Time; Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller and Thomas Deloney's Jack of Newbury - represent Elizabethan fiction at its best. The Adventures of Master F. J. is a comedy of manners with a sting in its tail. In Euphues John Lyly invented a new, elaborate rhetorical style which delighted its Elizabethan audience and has been praised or parodied ever since. Pandosto was Shakespeare's source for The Winter's Tale, but Greene's is a darker story designed to shock the reader accustomed to romantic conventions. The Unfortunate Traveller marks the peak of Nashe's gift for literary pastiche, mixing picaresque narrative with mock-historical fantasy. Jack of Newbury dedicated to 'All famous cloth Workers in England', sums up important social contradictions in sharply observed comic scenes and brisk, witty dialogue.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #499359 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Customer Reviews

There's more to Elizabethan literature than Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare...
So often when we think about Elizabethan literature we think about drama (especially, of course, Shakespeare), or poetry (Sidney, Spenser). This collection is therefore a nice antidote focusing on less well known prose works. Salzman's trilogy of collections for Oxford (An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction (Oxford World's Classics), Early Modern Women's Writing: An Anthology 1560-1700 (Oxford World's Classics)) does an excellent job of re-opening the canon and making lesser works accessible and affordable.

This collection is nicely varied: from the epistolary social comedy of Gascoigne's Adventures of Master FJ, to the linguistic excess of Lyly's Euphues, this charts a less well-worn trajectory and expands our understanding of what the canonicals were reading and writing against.

A really well-thought out collection - highly recommended for anyone interested in Elizabethan literature.