ABSTRACT
Critics have tended to present The Unfortunate Traveller either as a satirical look at some of the kinds of writing that were popular in Nashe’s day or as a text concerned with the differences between the English and their continental neighbors (Latham 1948; Wheeler 1998). There has not been enough attention paid to the connection between these topics, to the fact that his patriotism is often expressed through his comments on literature (see also Turner 2001). Central to Nashe’s thinking is the idea that literature should be original, by which he means that a text should not be too indebted to even the greatest continental and classical authors. Over the course of The Unfortunate Traveller, Nashe’s condemnations of the dependence on literary models that he appears to see as one of the major problems for the writers of his era become one of the text’s salient features. Less marked because less explicit (but, I would say, no less important) is his defence of prose as a medium for literature. In an era when prose narratives were very popular but not taken seriously, Nashe seeks to establish prose as equal or even superior to poetry. As I see it, his point is that poetry is associated with what he sees as an aristocratic desire to imitate continental fashions; prose, by contrast, is genuinely English and, as we would now say, middle-class.
