In the final decade of the sixteenth century, Samuel Fallon argues in Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England, a new kind of figure came into being: the literary persona. In this elegantly written and theoretically subtle study, Fallon explains that personae were writers’ alter egos and their avatars. Straddling the boundary between writer and work, a persona was at once a character within a given text and its putative author. Examples included the four figures Fallon discusses, Spenser's shepherd-poet Colin Clout, Sidney's poets Philisides and Astrophil, Thomas Nashe's satiric stand-in Pierce Penniless, and the charismatic prodigal Robert Greene, the semifictional, semiautobiographical invention of the romance writer of the same name. For a moment, personae were everywhere, giving an uncanny life to literary culture. Then they vanished.
Why did personae briefly become central to literary writing? In Fallon's account, the answer lies in the nature of the...
