「エリザベス朝小説」について

Abstract

This paper is on“the Elizabethan novels”which very vividly reflect the vital world of the age of Elizabeth I and the spirit and art of the Renaissance of that period. The romances and other prose writings by“the University Wits”like John Lyly, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge and Thomas Nash, etc., were, in a sense, forefathers of the new novels of the 18th century, though they were probably very indirect ones. These prose writers first influenced by Lyly’s “Euphuism”were greatly active in the then literary circles and against William Shakespeare who gradually came to distinguish himself in the world of Elizabethan drama. Thomas Deloney and Thomas Dekker as well as Greene and Nash were not a little realistic prose writers. Thus all the writers of pamphlets, romances and other realistic writings of those days contributed a great deal to the development of the English prose fictions.