Authorial Self-Consciousness in Nashe's The Vnfortvnate Traveller

This essay shows that the outrageous excesses of Thomas Nashe's style are deliberately subversive of the early modern economic, political, and—above all—literary hierarchy. Nashe embraces with gusto the transgressive power of narrative and the public marketplace, although the text also records ambivalence about the decline of patronage and the courtly modes it sustained. Through a consideration of The Vnfortvnate Traveller's bibliographic prescience, its extreme violence, and its equivocal narrative stance, this essay traces Nashe's self-implicating commentary on the early modern literary milieu.