Professor Colin Burrow
Renaissance literature; Early Tudor literature; Shakespeare; Ben Jonson; Classical literatures and their influence; editing.
As a Senior Research Fellow I lecture on topics in the period 1500-1700, and am happy to undertake graduate supervision on topics in Renaissance and comparative literature, in the history of classical reception, and in any other area in which I have an interest. I do not normally offer undergraduate supervision.
I have published on a wide range of topics in the period 1500-1700, and review regularly on a many areas (including Renaissance literature and contemporary fiction) for The London Review of Books. I have edited the non-dramatic works of Ben Jonson and of Shakespeare, but my principal research interests lie in relations between English, European and Classical literatures in the period 1500-1700. My volume in the Oxford English Literary History will reappraise writing in the lifetime of Elizabeth I (1533-1603), and covers drama as well as other genres. My study of Imitation will range widely across western literary and critical traditions, from Plato to the present day. I was involved in the Scriptorium project for digitizing early modern commonplace books, which grows out of my interests in editing and manuscript studies, and as Fellow .Librarian of my College I have a growing interest in book history. I have supervised graduate students on a wide range of topics, from early Tudor poetry and religion, through studies in the reception of classical literature in the sixteenth century, through seventeenth-century poetry, to Milton and Dryden and beyond.
Publications
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Shakespeare and Epic
November 2018|Chapter|Epic Performances from the Middle Ages Into the Twenty-First CenturyThis volume represents the first systematic attempt to chart the afterlife of epic in modern performance traditions, with chapters covering not only a significant chronological span, but also ranging widely across both place and genre, ...Literary Criticism -
Shakespeare's Authorities
January 2018|Chapter|Shakespeare and Authority Citations, Conceptions and ConstructionsThis book examines conceptions of authority for and in Shakespeare, and the construction of Shakespeare as literary and cultural authority.Literary Criticism, Shakespeare -
Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Event
June 2017|Chapter|The Sonnets: The State of PlayThis freeze-frame volume showcases the range of current debate and ideas surrounding these still startling poems.Literary Criticism -
Montaignian Moments: Shakespeare and the Essays
April 2016|Chapter|Montaigne in Transit: Essays in Honour of Ian MacleanThis volume tracks a Montaigne 'in transit' all the way from the genesis and production of his Essais and travel journal in the 1570s-1590s to their diffusion and reception from the 1580s up till the present day, in France, England, Germany, and elsewhere. The contributors take those key terms - genesis, production, diffusion, reception - as their starting-point, but show that the boundaries between them are blurred. How does embodied thought move through space and time between the author and reader of the Essais? Can the role of the ancient writers whom Montaigne quotes be assessed without consideration of the differences he knew there would be between readers' capacities to recognise and contextualise those quotations? Where does Montaigne's punctuation end and that of his compositors, editors, and translators begin? This volume asks such questions by exploring transit as a critical concept cutting across different languages, places, and times. Its authors include leading specialists in early modern French and English studies. It is a tribute to Ian Maclean, whose own trailblazing work has moved through and across numerous fields of early modern learned culture.