Joshua Phillips is Associate Professor of English at the University of Memphis, USA.

'... subtle, well written, and informed by a wide variety of scholarship. At a time when we have begun to investigate the possibility that even the great William Shakespeare had coauthors, English Fictions of Communal Identity is a useful reminder that no man - certainly no author - is an island.' Sixteenth Century Journal '... Phillips succeeds in advancing a fresh and stimulating appraisal of the fictional works and their interaction with a sixteenth-century readership. Asserting the capacity for society to have produced texts and meanings which conveyed a sense of collective identity, Phillips uses his evidence to reveal (borrowing Benedict Anderson's concept) 'imagined communities' whose members were alert to collective bonds. ... Phillips skilfully interweaves these theoretical insights with the practical realities of sixteenth-century communal life, including linkages based on clientage, patronage, kinship and marriage, legal institutions, as well as more nebulous links derived from local custom, neighbourly proximity, and friendship.' Parergon

• Introduction; Part I Belonging and Belongings; Chapter 1 The Caxtonian Imaginary: Knights and the Dreams of the Abbey-Lubbers; Chapter 2 Staking Claims to Utopia : Thomas More, Prose Fiction, and the Matter of Belonging; Part II Knowing Together, Laboring Together; Chapter 3 William Baldwin and Communities of Fiction; Chapter 4 Anthony Munday, Romance, and the Production of Collective Selves; Part III Broken Music: Re-imagining Collective Subjectivity; Chapter 5 Hoc Opus, Hic Labor Est : Sir Philip Sidney and the Work of Shame; Chapter 6 Thomas Nashe, Thy Unworthy Speaker to the World; conclusion Conclusion;

Joshua Phillips is Associate Professor of English at the University of Memphis, USA.

'... subtle, well written, and informed by a wide variety of scholarship. At a time when we have begun to investigate the possibility that even the great William Shakespeare had coauthors, English Fictions of Communal Identity is a useful reminder that no man - certainly no author - is an island.' Sixteenth Century Journal '... Phillips succeeds in advancing a fresh and stimulating appraisal of the fictional works and their interaction with a sixteenth-century readership. Asserting the capacity for society to have produced texts and meanings which conveyed a sense of collective identity, Phillips uses his evidence to reveal (borrowing Benedict Anderson's concept) 'imagined communities' whose members were alert to collective bonds. ... Phillips skilfully interweaves these theoretical insights with the practical realities of sixteenth-century communal life, including linkages based on clientage, patronage, kinship and marriage, legal institutions, as well as more nebulous links derived from local custom, neighbourly proximity, and friendship.' Parergon

• Introduction; Part I Belonging and Belongings; Chapter 1 The Caxtonian Imaginary: Knights and the Dreams of the Abbey-Lubbers; Chapter 2 Staking Claims to Utopia : Thomas More, Prose Fiction, and the Matter of Belonging; Part II Knowing Together, Laboring Together; Chapter 3 William Baldwin and Communities of Fiction; Chapter 4 Anthony Munday, Romance, and the Production of Collective Selves; Part III Broken Music: Re-imagining Collective Subjectivity; Chapter 5 Hoc Opus, Hic Labor Est : Sir Philip Sidney and the Work of Shame; Chapter 6 Thomas Nashe, Thy Unworthy Speaker to the World; conclusion Conclusion;

Joshua Phillips is Associate Professor of English at the University of Memphis, USA.

'... subtle, well written, and informed by a wide variety of scholarship. At a time when we have begun to investigate the possibility that even the great William Shakespeare had coauthors, English Fictions of Communal Identity is a useful reminder that no man - certainly no author - is an island.' Sixteenth Century Journal '... Phillips succeeds in advancing a fresh and stimulating appraisal of the fictional works and their interaction with a sixteenth-century readership. Asserting the capacity for society to have produced texts and meanings which conveyed a sense of collective identity, Phillips uses his evidence to reveal (borrowing Benedict Anderson's concept) 'imagined communities' whose members were alert to collective bonds. ... Phillips skilfully interweaves these theoretical insights with the practical realities of sixteenth-century communal life, including linkages based on clientage, patronage, kinship and marriage, legal institutions, as well as more nebulous links derived from local custom, neighbourly proximity, and friendship.' Parergon

• Introduction; Part I Belonging and Belongings; Chapter 1 The Caxtonian Imaginary: Knights and the Dreams of the Abbey-Lubbers; Chapter 2 Staking Claims to Utopia : Thomas More, Prose Fiction, and the Matter of Belonging; Part II Knowing Together, Laboring Together; Chapter 3 William Baldwin and Communities of Fiction; Chapter 4 Anthony Munday, Romance, and the Production of Collective Selves; Part III Broken Music: Re-imagining Collective Subjectivity; Chapter 5 Hoc Opus, Hic Labor Est : Sir Philip Sidney and the Work of Shame; Chapter 6 Thomas Nashe, Thy Unworthy Speaker to the World; conclusion Conclusion;