SOURCE: "The Rise of a New Literary Genre: Thomas Deloney's Bourgeois Novel Jack of Newbury," in Telling Stories: Studies in Honour of Ulrich Broich on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday, edited by Elmar Leh-mann and Bernd Lenz, B. R. Grüner, 1992, pp. 47–55.

In the following essay, Stemmler evaluates the historical frameworks and factual details in Deloney's novels. These elements, the critic argues, enhanced the stature of Deloney's bourgeois heroes and provided his middle-class readers with exemplary figures from their own sector of Elizabethan society.

After a long time of scholarly neglect Thomas Deloney's important contribution to the English novel has at long last been recognized. Based on the edition of his works by Francis O. Mann (1912)¹, and of his novels by Merritt E. Lawlis (1961)², a number of impressive studies have been published. Most of them deal with special topics such as style³ or structure⁴ of Deloney's novels...