ABSTRACT
The novel was not a sudden innovation at the end of the seventeenth century. Accounts of travels, which may or may not have been fictionalised to some extent, go back as far as the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, probably published in 1375. Other worlds and cultures, ways of living and believing, became a main characteristic of fiction through the Elizabethan age. Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) provides us with one of the earliest picaresque tales in English. It recounts ‘the life of Jack Wilton’ in a mixture of styles, anticipating the picaresque heroes and heroines of Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding just over a century later. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia was also influential in ‘fictionalising travel’ and thus providing impetus to the growth of the novel (see page 82).
