Eve Houghton

Free Indirect Style Before the Novel. Manuscript in preparation.

Free Indirect Style Before the Novel transforms the conventional understanding of early modern English fiction as a primitive or deficient precursor of the novel. It shows how writers including William Baldwin, George Gascoigne, John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, and Philip Sidney produced works of fiction that represent speech and thought with a productive uncertainty of narrative stance, often slipping between third- and first-person language and between the perspectives of narrator and character, and developing narrative techniques, such as free indirect style, later recognized as emblematic of the novel’s special ability to represent subjectivity. The book argues that free indirect style in early modern fiction foregrounds, with particular urgency, narration’s entanglement with the ethical stakes of understanding and giving voice to subjective experience.

Awkward Types: Character and Attention in Early Modern English Drama. Manuscript in preparation.

Awkward Types: Character and Attention in Early Modern English Drama tells the story of the rise of awkwardness as both a theatrical phenomenon and a new formation of early modern masculinity.  From pratfalls and inelegant dancing to awkward silences and deliberately unfunny jokes, awkwardness was a showcase for the performance of sophisticated actorly skills, involving precise control over the body and over the social dynamics of the stage. Awkward Types reanimates the early modern comic actors who played these roles: familiar names like Richard Burbage and Robert Armin, but also less-discussed figures like John Sinklo, Joseph Haines, and Cave Underhill. The charisma of the awkward type, his ability to steal attention away from more prominent players, shows us that the assumed hierarchies of masculine preeminence on the early modern stage were not so assured.