In "The Romance of the New World," Joan Pong Linton explores the ways in which fiction and non-fiction from the mid-1580's through the mid-1620's responded to England's earliest colonial ventures in America. Linton tracks the beginnings of what she sees as the literary formation of a proto-"bourgeois" ethic which utilizes the shifting standards of romance to cement a patriarchal model in both the domestic and political arenas. Portrayals of Native Americans and English women serve as foils to establishing the dominance of the English male, at times even at the expense of Queen Elizabeth.

Linton asserts that New World pamphleteers like Sir Walter Ralegh, Thomas Hariot, Sir Francis Drake, and John Smith, among others, use and adapt the tropes of romance to encourage new investors and adventurers to build interest in colonizing the New World. The interplay between history and fiction is mutually affective on both fiction and non-fiction, as romance writers in poetry and prose alter the form and setting of traditional court romance to reflect social and economic changes in late Elizabethan England. As English explorers like Drake and Ralegh leave the court to improve their fortunes and their social status, romance writers begin to change the ways that heroes alter their own fates through enterprise and action, moving away from the dalliance and intrigues of court.

Linton sees Edmund Spenser, author of "The Faerie Queene," as a mediator in the transition between courtly romance and the romance of the bourgeois individual. In her examinations of Spenser's "Faerie Queene" and "Colin Clouts Come Home Againe," Linton argues that Spenser's familiarity with various colonial writings, including those of Ralegh result in a heightened sensitivity to the changing nature of the heroic in romance as well as to English imperial aspirations abroad. Linton's most extensive treatments of Spenser are found in chapters 2 and 5. In chapter 2, Linton shows how Ralegh's written self-identification with Redcrosse and Guyon illustrate the changing face of the romance hero and act as justification and idealization of his colonial exploits. In the context of the mutually transformative nature of literary and political discourses, Linton goes on to show how Spenser defends Ralegh in "Colin Clout" and manages to invest the aims of empire with notions of Protestant propriety. Chapter 5 discusses "Faerie Queene, book 6"'s presentation of Serena, Calepine and the cannibals in the context of English colonial encounters with Native Americans. A book of equal interest to Renaissance, Spenserian, and Early American scholars, Linton's "The Romance of the New World" is an invaluable critical work.