Eve Houghton

Experimental Fictions: Representing Speech and Thought Before the Novel. Manuscript in preparation.

Experimental Fictions 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 nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel and to modernist writing, I claim the vocabulary of experiment for sixteenth-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 recognized 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 modern narrative theoretical categories.

Masculinity and Minor Characters on the Early Modern Stage: Four Types. Manuscript in preparation.

Masculinity and Minor Characters brings gender studies and the history of masculinity into conversation with early modern theatre studies. Each of the four chapters centres on a seventeenth-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, I argue for the theatrical charisma of the minor character and his ability to steal attention away from more prominent players. I draw on early dramatic criticism and theatre history research to reconstruct 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.