Dr Eve Houghton

Dr Houghton writes about early modern English prose and drama. She has particular interests in prose style, narrative theory, gender and sexuality, and the history of the book.

Her upcoming first monograph, Experimental Fictions: Representing Speech and Thought Before the Novel, argues for the narratorial innovation of early modern English prose fiction, a body of writing often marginalized and misunderstood in literary histories that position the novel as the apex of historical development. While experimental is an adjective usually applied to the 19th- and 20th-century novel and to modernist writing, Experimental Fictions claims the vocabulary of experiment for 16th-century writers, such as William Baldwin, George Gascoigne, John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, and Philip Sidney, who reimagined the literary conventions of their time for a new purpose: representing speech and thought in narrative prose fiction. Some of those experiments are unfamiliar and alienating to readers accustomed to novelistic form. Others have become paradigmatic techniques for representing subjectivity in narrative language: techniques, like interior monologue, psycho-narration, and free indirect style, retroactively recognised as signature features of the novel. Experimental Fictions calls for a rethinking of literary value and the canon of narrative prose writing in English, showing how historical literary examples invite us to reimagine narrative theory.

Another upcoming book, Masculinity and Minor Characters on the Early Modern Stage: Four Types, brings gender studies and the history of masculinity into conversation with early modern theatre studies. Each of the four chapters centres on a 17th-century male stage type with an aspirational or vexed relationship to genteel masculinity: the gull, the malcontent, the fop, and the booby. Considering plays by Shakespeare, John Marston, William Wycherley, and Aphra Behn, the book argues for the theatrical charisma of the minor character and his ability to steal attention away from more prominent players. It reconstructs the work of comic actors like John Sinklo, Joseph Haines, and Cave Underhill, arguing that, while these minor characters often fail to achieve social prestige or erotic satisfaction in the world of the play, they triumph in the economy of audience attention. The book offers original archival research, including new identifications of early modern actors with particular roles, and a fresh approach to the study of masculinity that brings together theatrical criticism, stage history, and gender studies.

Dr Houghton's scholarly articles have appeared in venues including Critical Inquiry, ELH: English Literary History, and The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. With Kate De Rycker, Andrew Hadfield, and Jennifer Richards, she is a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Thomas Nashe. She is co-editing, with Dennis Duncan, a volume of essays on the history of the book index. She is also co-editing, with Colton Valentine, a special issue of the journal narrative on free indirect style in languages other than English. The issue includes work on French, German, Spanish, Latin, Polish, Russian, Korean, and Chinese literature. She has a strong record of public engagement through organising conferences and theatrical performances and curating library exhibitions. Most recently, she organised a two-day conference, 'Thomas Nashe and Voice', held at St John’s in January 2026. The conference featured three keynote talks and 23 papers, as well as a staged reading of Nashe’s Pierce Penniless commissioned for the event and performed by the Beyond Shakespeare Company.