The works of John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Thomas Lodge effectively established prose fiction in print at the end of the sixteenth century. In these extraordinary pamphlets, rhetorical sophistication is married with the outlandish adventures of young lovers, ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture combined. Fictions of Authorship re-examines these narratives in the light of their creators' developing understanding of the implications of authorship. Christened the ‘University Wits’ by an earlier generation of critics, Lyly, Greene, and Lodge were themselves displaced persons, attempting to shape careers in th ... More

The works of John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Thomas Lodge effectively established prose fiction in print at the end of the sixteenth century. In these extraordinary pamphlets, rhetorical sophistication is married with the outlandish adventures of young lovers, ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture combined. Fictions of Authorship re-examines these narratives in the light of their creators' developing understanding of the implications of authorship. Christened the ‘University Wits’ by an earlier generation of critics, Lyly, Greene, and Lodge were themselves displaced persons, attempting to shape careers in the new and often despised medium of print. Their attempts to demonstrate their learning while appealing to as wide a readership as possible led them to manufacture multiple authorial personae, and to reflect critically and sometimes outrageously on the works of their contemporaries and predecessors. Their texts are closely interwoven with each other. The authors competed to set new literary trends, often by overgoing the attempts of their peers. Apparently opposed literary modes were mixed, resulting in the placement of a persona like Lyly's Euphues in Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Meanwhile the relationship between writer and reader became increasingly complex, as the authors began to tailor their fictions to an ever expanding market. By providing close and comparative readings of these short fictions, Fictions of Authorship charts the authors' increasing disillusionment with the confines of romance, but also their popular success. As they assimilated and domesticated the experiments of writers like Harvey, Sidney and Spenser, they created an irreverent alternative canon of ‘English literature'.