The Elizabethans witnessed not only a great flowering of drama, but also a flourishing of fiction and the development of a literary entertainment business. Printing made possible a wide distribution of cheap books that found an audience in all sections of society. The large, new literary market enabled the presentation of different social viewpoints and encouraged an alternative to ‘official’ ideology. First published in 1985, Novel and Society in Elizabethan England presents a whole range of English fiction of the period against its social background. It considers the major authors of prose fiction—John Lyly, Philip Sidney, Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, and Thomas Deloney—and examines how they organised their works for audiences with a specific social perspective.

In taking a functional view of literature, treating the novels not as static literary artefacts but in terms of their social role, Margolies redefines the idea of literary value. He offers a new, coherent view of the major figures of the Elizabethan novel, which should challenge the thinking of students of the novel and the age of Shakespeare.