- Title
- Authorship, publication, reception (1): 1470-1660
- Creator
- Salzman, Paul
- Relation
- The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 1: Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750 p. 3-25
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199580033.003.0001
- Publisher
- Oxford Scholarship Online
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- This chapter charts the nature of prose fiction from the arrival of printing in England through to the Restoration. Already flourishing in manuscript form prior to William Caxton, romance continued to be the mainstay of prose narrative into the mid-sixteenth century, especially with the influence of French and Iberian chivalric romance. From the 1560s, the Continental novella was also popular, particularly the works of Matteo Bandello. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw the growing influence of Don Quixote and Spanish picaresque, as well as a rich interchange between drama, fiction, and more ephemeral forms of prose. While the development of prose fiction during this period was by no means an uncomplicated evolutionary rise, there was a constant growth in its heterogeneity and in the size and diversity of its readership, with a nascent sense of prose fiction as a genre by the Restoration.
- Description
- Online edition
- Subject
- romance; novella; drama; picaresque; genre; literary studies
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1446862
- Identifier
- uon:42980
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780199580033
- Language
- eng
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