Esther Yu (Stanford, English)

The Printhouse Conscience and Tudor Prose Fiction

Please note that this is a pre-circulated paper. Those with Stanford-affiliated emails can access the paper by clicking this link. For those outside of the Stanford community, email cmemsinfo [at] stanford.edu (cmemsinfo[at]stanford[dot]edu) to receive a copy of the paper. 

Response by Roland Greene. 

The abstract for the talk:

First-person prose narrative is the overlooked innovation of early modern English print culture. When such works as Baldwin's Beware the Cat (printed 1561), the Marprelate tracts (1558-89), and Nashe's Unfortunate Traveler (1594) resist conventions of third-person narration, they create a first-person position within well-established strictures. Their newsy filter, formed through the printing press, belongs alongside the lyric subjectivity of Renaissance sonnets, Michel de Montaigne’s essayistic “I,” and the Spanish pícaro’s narration as one of the sixteenth century’s distinctive—and contentious—first-person modes. Readers of Defoe and Richardson will recognize how thoroughly the first-person point of view is embedded alongside circumstantial detail as the double helix of the early British novel. But it was far from obvious in the early Tudor era that the first person would become a primary locus for innovation in prose fiction, and the far-reaching influence of the texts considered here has since been obscured by notable contemporaries who pushed back or borrowed without attribution (usually both). If the novel is, as Mikhail Bakhtin memorably puts it, the genre that “takes place in the full light of the historical day,” first-person narration merits attention as a principal and novelty-inducing element whose still-evolving presence invites another history.