FROM THE PUBLISHER

"This study examines the lives and works of three Elizabethan authors - John Lyly, Philip Sidney, and Robert Greene - in order to trace an important transition in authorship at an historical moment in England. In sixteenth-century England "poetry" (in Sidney's inclusive sense of all fiction) was "juvenilia" - a youthful exercise that one gave up as one took one's place in the world as a responsible adult. There was consequently something of a stigma to writing fiction as an adult, and the notion of a "career" as a writer of poetry or fiction was virtually inconceivable. It is the purpose of this study to suggest how such a career finally became conceivable at this historical moment by examining the ways each of these authors managed to negotiate a relationship to writing that enabled them to mature into adulthood, not only without relinquishing their writing, but actually by means of the self-scrutiny and social interaction enabled by that writing." This study also investigates some of the many cultural inflections of manhood in Elizabethan England - both in the relationship of fathers to sons and the relationship of men to women.

SYNOPSIS