Elizabethan fiction has profited from the newer modes of critical inquiry. Such texts as George Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F. J., John Lyly's Euphues, George Pettie's A Petite Palace of Pettie his Pleasure, or Nicholas Breton's The Miseries of Mavilla have often been seen as the work of "hack" writers, inelegant aberrations that demonstrated little about the culture of 16th-century Britain or the development of English fiction.

This collection of original essays draws on a wide range of critical and theoretical approaches, especially those influenced by various elements of feminism, Marxism, and cultural studies. They illuminate the richness of canonical examples of Elizabethan fiction (Sidney's Arcadia) and less widely read works (Henry Chettle's Piers Plainess).