Paper Monsters : Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England / Samuel Fallon.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fallon, Samuel, Author.

Series:

Material texts.

Material Texts

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English literature.

Persona (Literature).

Characters and characteristics in literature.

Authors and readers--England--History--16th century.

Authors and readers.

Authors and readers--England--History--17th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (241 pages).

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In Paper Monsters, Samuel Fallon charts the striking rise, at the turn to the seventeenth century, of a new species of textual being: the serial, semifictional persona. When Thomas Nashe introduced his charismatic alter ego Pierce Penilesse in a 1592 text, he described the figure as a "paper monster," not fashioned but "begotten" into something curiously like life. The next decade bore this description out, as Pierce took on a life of his own, inspiring other writers to insert him into their own works. And Pierce was hardly alone: such figures as the polemicist Martin Marprelate, the lovers Philisides and Astrophil, the shepherd-laureate Colin Clout, the prodigal wit Euphues, and, in an odd twist, the historical author Robert Greene all outgrew their fictional origins, moving from text to text and author to author, purporting to speak their own words, even surviving their creators' deaths, and installing themselves in the process as agents at large in the real world of writing, publication, and reception.In seeking to understand these "paper monsters" as a historically specific and rather short-lived phenomenon, Fallon looks to the rapid expansion of the London book trade in the years of their ascendancy. Personae were products of print, the medium that rendered them portable, free-floating figures. But they were also the central fictions of a burgeoning literary field: they embodied that field's negotiations between manuscript and print, and they forged a new form of public, textual selfhood. Sustained by the appropriative rewritings they inspired, personae came to seem like autonomous citizens of the literary public. Fallon argues that their status as collective fictions, passed among writers, publishers, and readers, positioned personae as the animating figures of what we have come to call "print culture."

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Robert Greene's Ghosts

Chapter 2. Rehearsing Colin Clout

Chapter 3. Astrophil, Philisides, and the Coterie in Print

Chapter 4. Pierce Penilesse and the Art of Distinctions

Coda

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780812296174

0812296176

OCLC:

1107600927