"From popular rogue pamphlets and collections of novelle to courtly romances like Philip Sidney's Arcadia and Mary Wroth's Urania, English Renaissance prose fiction enticed male and female readers alike with fantastic, exotic, sometimes violent, tales of love and sexual passion. Rescuing these texts from critical neglect, this volume richly demonstrates the role that prose fiction played in the fashioning and ... Read morecirculation of sexual discourses during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It gathers historically and theoretically informed essays that shrewdly analyze the narrative and ideological strategies employed by prose fiction writers to represent the erotic plurality of English Renaissance literature and culture. In the process, this collection offers exciting new perspectives not only on sexuality (including, but not limited to, its 'hetero' and 'homo' varieties), but also on racial difference, religious conflict, market economics, male friendship, female chastity, and gender performance in the early modern period." - Mario DiGangi, Associate Professor of English, Lehman College and The Graduate Center, CUNY "Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570-1640, offers a significant contribution to early modern scholarship and recent work on the history of sexuality. By foregrounding the formal, historical and political aspects of prose fiction, the essays work collectively to complicate assumptions about the 'normative' sexual subject and expand the field of erotic representation for historians of literature, gender and sexuality. This important book will be of interest to scholars and students of early modern literature and culture, and to all interested in archival and theoretical resources available for advancing the history of sexuality." - Carla Mazzio, University of Chicago Show Less