An examination of representations of books and reading in 16th- and 17th-century English romance texts and the myths and metaphors these representations create, perpetuate, and reimagine
In romances characters often discover books that turn out to be magical or prophetic, and to offer insights into their readers' selves. This examines scenes of reading in important romance texts across genres. It calls for a new focus on imaginary or "immaterial” books, and argues that early modern romance authors revived ancient and medieval ideas of the book as a conceptual framework, which they used to investigate urgent, new ideas about the self and the self-conscious mind.
