This dissertation offers a new account of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century fiction-making through a reevaluation of early modern Hellenism. I demonstrate that the reconstruction of ancient Greek culture functioned as an origin point for the emergence of both modern scholarship and modern fiction, merging scholarly speculation with imaginative world-creation. Through the processes of speculative and imaginative reconstruction, early modern authors and scholars found in the self-conscious belatedness of Greek postclassicism (Hellenistic and Second Sophistic Greek literature produced after the “golden age” of classical Athens) a provocative reflection of their own attempts to revive a distant classical past. Postclassical Greek authors thus acted as mediators of early Greek antiquity, modeling through their own hybridized fictions literary strategies for “coming after.” By proposing a historically palimpsestic model for reception, my dissertation reorients our understanding of early modern cultural recovery away from a discourse of melancholic loss towards one of empowered belatedness.

In uncovering the neglected influence of this postclassical Greek corpus, my dissertation offers an interdisciplinary archaeology of fiction that connects manifestly innovative works of early modern literature that have often defied attempts at classification – Thomas More’s Utopia, François Rabelais’ Gargantua, Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, and William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida – to early modern discourses of pedagogy, philosophy, politics, and geography. The works of imaginative literature I examine negotiate “Greekness” as a transnational and transtemporal cultural palimpsest, one informed by the mobile and decentered Hellenism that characterized the expansive imperial reach of the postclassical and Byzantine Greek worlds. I show how the contemporary geo-cultural boundaries of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires inflected early modern perceptions of Greek identity. By situating early modern Hellenism within networks of print culture and by attending to the transmission of material texts, my project places English early modernity within a larger transnational intellectual community.