ABSTRACT
The reasons for his relegation to the periphery of critical concern are revealing. Stanley Wells sums them up in the introduction to his edition of Nashe. The principal obstacle to a higher valuation of his work 'is the fact that his writings are difficult to categorize':
In order to express this 'spirit of process and inconclusiveness', this sense of reality as a future-oriented continuum ever in the making, the novel must effect a clean break with the sealed-off, past-bound universe encoded in classical and medieval epic narrative. It must fashion a new
46Narrative:FromM
The proliferation of alternative phrases and the volatile paratactic momentum suggest an abundance of latent semantic possibilities far exceeding the capacity of any sentence to punctuate and contain them. These suppressed reserves of further expression and connection expose the inadequacy of the particular formulation achieved to supply a definitive account of its subject, insisting that more remains to be said, and to be said in quite different ways, than the prevailing construction can ever hope to accommodate.
