Description
Book SynopsisIn 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,
Trade Review
"[Paper Monsters] throughout is elegantly written, persuasively argued, and well anchored in current theoretical and critical debates: it will be the starting point for any future consideration of literary personae and the role they played in the early modern literary field independently of the authors who created or inspired them." * Journal of British Studies *
"Samuel Fallon is a skilled and often revelatory close reader of literature who displays a remarkable familiarity with minor writers and publishers of late Elizabethan England. Capacious and ambitious in its scope, Paper Monsters is a distinctive and highly accomplished piece of literary criticism." * Alan Stewart, Columbia University *
Table of 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
