Eve Houghton
Research Fellow
Research interests(BA, Yale, MPhil, Cambridge, PhD, Yale) for English
I am a scholar of early modern English literature. My current research, on free indirect style before the novel, is about the representation of speech and thought in the early days of English prose fiction.
My PhD thesis traced the early modern theatrical history of awkwardness, defined as the charismatic redirection, or misdirection, of audience attention. Each chapter centered on one of the early modern stage’s awkward types – the gull, the malcontent, the fop and the booby – in works by playwrights from William Shakespeare to Aphra Behn. I showed how these minor characters, often hopelessly inept in the traditional spheres of masculine self-assertion, were nonetheless capable of disrupting the hierarchy between leading men and supporting players.
At St John’s I am writing a book about early methods for representing speech and thought in sixteenth-century English fiction. Lacking novelistic methods (e.g. quotation marks), writers like George Gascoigne, John Lyly, and Thomas Nashe experimented with a range of techniques for channeling the thoughts and voices of their characters. Their efforts were not always successful or consistent. The result, I argue, is a mobile and wandering point of view – a proto form of free indirect style.
I am a scholar of early modern English literature. My current research, on free indirect style before the novel, is about the representation of speech and thought in the early days of English prose fiction.
My PhD thesis traced the early modern theatrical history of awkwardness, defined as the charismatic redirection, or misdirection, of audience attention. Each chapter centered on one of the early modern stage’s awkward types – the gull, the malcontent, the fop and the booby – in works by playwrights from William Shakespeare to Aphra Behn. I showed how these minor characters, often hopelessly inept in the traditional spheres of masculine self-assertion, were nonetheless capable of disrupting the hierarchy between leading men and supporting players.
At St John’s I am writing a book about early methods for representing speech and thought in sixteenth-century English fiction. Lacking novelistic methods (e.g. quotation marks), writers like George Gascoigne, John Lyly, and Thomas Nashe experimented with a range of techniques for channeling the thoughts and voices of their characters. Their efforts were not always successful or consistent. The result, I argue, is a mobile and wandering point of view – a proto form of free indirect style.