In Paper Monsters, Samuel Fallon charts the striking rise, at the turn
to the seventeenth century, of a new species of textual being: the
serial, semifictional persona. When Thomas Nashe introduced his
charismatic alter ego Pierce Penilesse in a 1592 text, he described the
figure as a paper monster, not fashioned but begotten into something
curiously like life. The next decade bore this description out, as
Pierce took on a life of his own, inspiring other writers to insert him
into their own works. And Pierce was hardly alone: such figures as the
polemicist Martin Marprelate, the lovers Philisides and Astrophil, the
shepherd-laureate Colin Clout, the prodigal wit Euphues, and, in an odd
twist, the historical author Robert Greene all outgrew their fictional
origins, moving from text to text and author to author, purporting to
speak their own words, even surviving their creators' deaths, and
installing themselves in the process as agents at large in the real
world of writing, publication, and reception.
In seeking to understand these paper monsters as a historically specific
and rather short-lived phenomenon, Fallon looks to the rapid expansion
of the London book trade in the years of their ascendancy. Personae were
products of print, the medium that rendered them portable, free-floating
figures. But they were also the central fictions of a burgeoning
literary field: they embodied that field's negotiations between
manuscript and print, and they forged a new form of public, textual
selfhood. Sustained by the appropriative rewritings they inspired,
personae came to seem like autonomous citizens of the literary public.
Fallon argues that their status as collective fictions, passed among
writers, publishers, and readers, positioned personae as the animating
figures of what we have come to call print culture.
