This bookanalyzes the role of romance as a catalyst in remaking Arcadia in five, canonical sixteenth-century texts: Sannazaro¿s Arcadia, Montemayor¿s La Diana, Cervantes¿La Galatea, Sidney¿s Arcadia, and Lope de Vegäs Arcadia. Collins¿ analyses of the re-imagined Arcadia in these works elucidate the interplay between timely incursions into the fictional world and the timelessness of art, highlighting issues of freedom, identity formation, subjectivity and self-fashioning, the intersection of public and private activity, and the fascination with mortality.