Thomas Lodge was the most versatile of the pioneering professional writers of the English Renaissance, experimenting in an astonishing variety of forms. His long, eventful, and well-documented life makes him one of the most individualized figures of his age, and yet also one of the most representative. This is the first-ever collection of Lodge scholarship. It comprises a selection of the best and most important biographical and critical work, ranging from 1932 to 2008 and including first-time English translations. Charles Whitney's discerning introduction discusses each article or book chapter in the context of Lodge scholarship and beyond, and is supplemented by a bibliography of additional material. This unique collection offers a distinctive vantage on both Lodge and many current topics in Renaissance and early modern studies such as humanism, republicanism, romance, intertextuality, plagiarism, gender, colonization, Shakespearean sources, the histories of print and of reading, authorship, and English Catholicism and religious conflict.

"Thomas Lodge and his Renaissance contemporaries-- among them William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and Sir Philip Sidney-- were all searching for new means of literary expression. Lodge experimented in prose fiction and the essay, in drama, verse narrative and verse satire, and in various forms of lyrics; in doing so, he helped to build the foundation in these genres for writers of generations to follow. This study traces his contribution to the developmentof English literature during the reign of Elizabeth I and James I. Beyond his writing, Thomas Lodge's life was full one. He voyaged to the New World with an Elizabethan privateer. He studied medicine at the University of Avignon, France, and was a practicing physician London. He lost his life attending the sick in the London Plague of 1625. Wesley D. Rae considers the multifaceted aspects of Lodge's career, and he views Lodge not only as an author of note, but as a Renaissance gentleman and a true representative of his age." -Publisher.

Steve Mentz provides a comprehensive historicist and formalist account of prose romance, the most important genre of Elizabethan fiction. He explores how authors and publishers of prose fiction in late sixteenth-century England produced books that combined traditional narrative forms with a dynamic new understanding of the relationship between text and audience. Though prose fiction would not dominate English literary culture until the eighteenth century, Mentz demonstrates that the form began to invent itself as a distinct literary kind in England nearly two centuries earlier.