ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that Lenten Stuffe creates out of Yarmouth's proximity to the ocean a fantasy of escaping the urban and romance economies that dominate Thomas Nashe's career. Nashe saw in Yarmouth's oceanic world an economy of abundance that contrasted with the stark competitiveness of his urban milieu. Nashe's misogyny measures his resistance to romance as a genre-and-gender category that he never fully escapes. The chapter argues that The Unfortunate Traveler is fundamentally a romance, albeit a "dishonest" one. It examines the textual vignette in it that was the last romance episode that Nashe wrote, the burlesque of Hero and Leander by suggesting that Lenten Stuffe bring Nashe's relationship with prose romance to a conclusion. The chapter also suggests that Nashe's tantalizing oceanic turn aligns his literary output with a broader cultural trend, in which early modern England and its colonies came to construct a transoceanic English identity after the turn of the seventeenth century.
