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Barr, Dr Helen
Job Title: CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow
College: Lady Margaret Hall
Period/ Subject: Medieval
Email address: helen.barr@ell.ox.ac.uk
Research Interests:
I’m currently writing a book which examines the transport of ‘Chaucer’ back and forth between the Middle Ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Instead of source and analogue study, I am examining intratextual and intratemporal relationships, especially the transport of names and bodies. I’m looking at the narrative consequences of remembering persons who appear not to appear within the timeframes of ‘later’ texts; how their presence, in name, ghosted body, and/or conspicuous omission, affects narrative resolution between works. The traffic of bodies and body parts between fragments of the Canterbury Tales, continuations of the Canterbury journey, and bodies in Canterbury itself ,raise questions about the understanding of ‘character’, authorship, and ‘place’. An extended area of study here is the contested representation of hands between written texts of the Canterbury Tales and between manuscript illustrations. I am mainly focussing on The Canterbury Tales, the work of the Beryn-poet, Lydgate and some sixteenth and seventeenth century drama, especially but not only, Shakespeare and Davenant. The next stage of exploring routes not yet travelled between Troy and Southwark will explore the soundscapes of Troilus and Cressida and Chaucer's House of Fame.
In working on Chaucer’s hands, I’ve realised that a study of the work of hands in Middle English literary culture has yet to be written. I may work on this as the next project.
Teaching Areas:
Old English, Middle English, Shakespeare, The English Language, Introduction to Literary Studies
Recent Publications:
'The Pearl-Poet' in The Bible in English Literature, ed. Rebecca Lemon et al (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
2009)
'Contemporary Events' in A Concise Companion to Middle English Literature, ed. Marilyn Corrie
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
The Digby Poems: A New Edition of the Lyrics (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009)
'Religious Practice in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale: Rabbit and/or Duck?', Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 32 (2010), 39-66
'The Place of the Poor in The Piers Plowman Tradition' in From Beowulf to Caxton, eds., Tomonori Matsushita, A.V.C. Schmidt and David Wallace (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), pp.79-98
Other Information:
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