Steve Mentz provides a comprehensive historicist and formalist account of prose romance, the most important genre of Elizabethan fiction. He explores how author

This was the first full-scale history of medieval English literature for nearly a century. Thirty-three distinguished contributors offer a collaborative account

showing that contrary to the commonly held view that romances are representative of the "popular culture" of their day, in fact such texts appealed primarily to

In romances—Renaissance England’s version of the fantasy novel—characters often discover books that turn out to be magical or prophetic, and to offer insi