SOURCE: "Nashe and the Stuff of Prose," in Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction, Associate University Press, Inc., 1993, pp. 64-81.

In the following excerpt from his study of Elizabethan fiction, Barbour examines Nashe's concept of prose, with particular attention to his The Terrors of the Night.

A Little Night Stuff

… I am arguing that the peculiarities of Nashe's quasisomatic prose can be studied in terms of the contradictions between his commission to fill gaps in the body and soul of the status quo and the endogenous invention of that prose. We can focus the questions arising from "stuff if we look at Nashe's The Terrors of the Night or, a Discourse of Apparitions (registered, 1593; published, 1594). Nashe's interest in spirits began … in Pierce Penilesse, where he delves into demonology. In that text, Nashe initiates his lifelong fascination with voids and sieves—images that appear in one form or another in many of...