Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Louise Schleiner

Critical Essay by Louise Schleiner

SOURCE: "Ladies and Gentlemen in Two Genres of Elizabethan Fiction," in SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 29, No. 1, Winter, 1989, pp. 1-20.

In the essay below, Schleiner discusses the depiction of gender and maturation in Elizabethan fiction.

Elizabethan prose fiction presents rich materials for study of the relationship of gender to genre. Its courtly tales are masculinist to the core—John Lyly's Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit (1578), and its sequel Euphues and his England (1580), popularized a distinct Bildungsroman plot pattern, imitated in numerous works of the 1580s and 90s, that takes young aristocrats through a set of episodes depicting maturation into proper patriarchal masculinity. Its romances, by contrast, commonly use the device of gender disguise to explore the natures of both maleness and femaleness through depictions of adolescent maturation. The present essay will show that these two different modes of portrayal of maturation into gender identity...
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