Alexander Oldys’s Comic Displacement of Romance in The Fair Extravagant

Abstract

[Abstract] In Alexander Oldys’s The Fair Extravagant (1682), the male protagonist is anxious about his authority as a husband due to the heroine’s superior social rank and wealth, her strong personality, and her free agency. This paper shows how this is presented in a kind of novel of trial that intends to test the protagonist’s manly virtues through a comic displacement of chivalric romance. It draws on Bakhtin’s concept of Prüfungsroman and his idea that the novel is a markedly dialogic genre, often permeated with irony and parody. This analysis also assumes that manhood is a social and cultural construction which is materialised in a status that men must achieve under the constant scrutiny and assessment of others.