Gildon's Prose Fiction

An Innovator and an Adapter During a Time of Transition

Writing during a time before the word "novel" was commonly used to describe long works of prose fiction and long before it took the form we recognize today, Gildon produced three long works of prose fiction that contributed to the development of the form.

Gildon credits Ferrante Pallavicino's Il Corriero svaligiato (1641), or the post-boy robbed of his bag, for the premise of The Post-boy Robb'd of His Mail, and his The New Metamorphosis is an retelling and updating of The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius. But his The Golden Spy offers a premise all Gildon's own—a series of tales exposing human baseness and hypocrisy narrated by a collection of talking coins, the first instance of the object narrative sub-genre in English.