This book analyzes how narrative technique developed from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the eighteenth-century. The contributors address issues such as subjectivity, performance, voice, narrative time, character development and genre, placing their readings of early modern prose texts within the diachronic frame of the overall topic. Individual chapters will treat texts from a variety of genres, offering analyses of individual texts in the context of changes and developments within literary forms. The book in its entirety will cover a period of approximately 350 years, from 1370 to 1720.

Selected Contents: Introduction, Ebbe Klitgård and Gerd Bayer Part 1: The Growing Sense of Self 1. The Encoding of Subjectivity in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale and Pardoner's Tale, Ebbe Klitgård 2. The Representation of Thought from Chaucer to Aphra Behn, Monika Fludernik 3. Writing Selves: Early Modern Life Writing and the Genesis of the Novel, Miriam Nandi Part 2: The Force of Intertextuality 4. Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls and His Pre-Text of Narration,William Quinn, William Quinn 5. From Hell: A Mirror for Magistrates and the Late Elizabethan Female Complaint, Anna Swärdh 6. Telling Tales: the Artistry of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, Rahel Orgis 7. The Early English Novel in Antwerp: The Impact of Jan van Doesborch, Robert Maslen Part 3: The Consolidation of Genre 8. Narrative and Poesis: Defoe, Ovid, and Transformative Writing, Gabrielle Starr 9. The Prenovel: Theory and the Archive, Goran Stanivukovic 10. Paratext and Genre: Making Seventeenth-Century Readers, Gerd Bayer Part 4: The Presence of Social Discourses 11. Narrative and Gossip in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Neil Cartlidge 12. Transubstantiation, Transvestism, and the Transformative Power of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, Christina Wald