Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexuality, 1570-1640 brings together twelve new essays which situate the arguments about the multiple constructions of sexualities in prose fiction within contemporary critical debates about the body, gender, desire, print culture, postcoloniality, and cultural geography. Looking at Sidney's Arcadia , Wroth's Urania , Lyly's Euphues ; fictions by Gascoigne, Riche, Parry, and Brathwaite; as well as Hellenic romances, rogue fictions, and novelle, the essays expand and challenge current critical arguments about the gendering of labour, female eroticism, queer masculinity, sodomy, male friendship, cross-dressing, heteroeroticism, incest, and the gendering of poetic creativity.

Introduction: Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570-1640; C.C.Relihan & G.V.Stanivukovic PART I: GENDER, GENRE, AND SEXUALITY Love, Chastity and Woman's Erotic Power: Greek Romances in Elizabethan and Jacobean Context; D.C.Greenhalgh 'Dissordinate Desire' and the Construction of Geographic Otherness in the Early Modern Novella; C.C.Relihan Passion and Reason in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia; L.Hopkins The Thigh and the Sword: Gender, Genre, and Sexy Dressing in Sidney's New Arcadia; S.Mentz Prisoners of Love: Crosscultural and Supernatural Desires in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania; S.T.Cavanagh PART II: QUEER FICTIONS Same Difference: Homo and Allo in Lyly's Euphues; S.Guy-Bray Rogue-Sirens: Urban Seductions and the Collapse of Amicitia; M.Holmes Gelding Gascoigne; A.Stewart 'Knights in Armes': The Homoerotics of the English Renaissance Prose Romances; G.V.Stanivukovic PART III: TEXTUALITY AND DESIRE Emasculating Romance: Historical Fiction in the Protectorate; E.Sauer Sidney, Gascoigne and the 'Bastard Poets'; R.W.Maslen Unfolding the Shepherdess: A Revision of Pastoral; L.H.Newcomb Afterword