Dr Eve Houghton, St John's
eh565@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I am a Research Fellow in English at St John’s College, Cambridge. I was educated at Cambridge (MPhil) and Yale (BA, PhD).
Research Interests
My research focuses on early modern English literature, particularly prose fiction and the history of the novel, theater history, and book history and bibliography. My essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, ELH, and The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. I am also co-editing, with Dennis Duncan, a volume on the history of the book index.
I am currently working on two books. He Said/She Said: Free Indirect Style Before the Novel is about emerging methods for representing speech and thought in sixteenth-century English fiction. Free indirect style is associated with the novel, but it has a history that pre-dates the novel as a genre. Lacking novelistic methods (e.g. quotation marks), writers like George Gascoigne, John Lyly, and Thomas Nashe adapted conventions from existing forms such as the dialogue, the sonnet sequence, and the playbook to figure the transition from one consciousness to another. The result can be disorienting: a wandering point of view that channels diverse perspectives. Focusing particularly on narrative depictions of sexual consent and sexual assault, I argue that this protoform of free indirect style foregrounds, with particular urgency, narration’s entanglement with the ethical stakes of understanding and giving voice to other people’s experiences.
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. On stage, failure paradoxically required forms of actorly virtuosity. 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. Drawing on early dramatic criticism and on the surviving records of audience reception from Shakespeare to Aphra Behn, 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.
Selected Publications
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
“He Said/She Said: Free Indirect Style Before the Novel.” Critical Inquiry 51.2 (Winter 2025): 247-267.
“Overmeasure: The Indexes of Francis Daniel Pastorius.” In The Book Index through History, eds. Dennis Duncan and Eve Houghton. Forthcoming.
“Fops vs Tops: Character and Attention in The Country Wife.” ELH 90.3 (Fall 2023): 667-691.
“Private Owners, Public Books: Henrietta Bartlett’s Feminist Bibliography.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 116.4 (Winter 2022): 567-587.
Book Reviews
Review of Jonathan Sawday, Blanks, Print, Space, and Void in English Renaissance Literature. Review of English Studies. January 2024.
Review of Angus Vine, Miscellaneous Order. Times Literary Supplement. September 2019.
Review of James Raven, What is the History of the Book?. Times Literary Supplement. September 2018.
Review of Margit Smith, The Medieval Girdle Book. Times Literary Supplement. March 2018.
Exhibition Catalogues
The First Folio: Shakespeare For All Time? Yale University Library, 2023.
Pastime with Good Company: Writing and Leisure in Early Modern England. In Subscribed: The Manuscript in Britain, 1500-1800. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2020.
