Graduate Student, Department of English
College of Humanities
Thesis Title: '“Universal Darkness buries All”; Re-reading the underworld of The Dunciad in Four Books.'
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Dr. Henry Power
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About
I completed my undergraduate degree last year at Mansfield College, Oxford, before moving to the University of Exeter as a postgraduate student in eighteenth-century English literature. My general research interest is in the poetry and drama of the first half of the eighteenth-century; specific authors such as Pope, Swift, Gay, and Milton are of prime interest in my research, as are more popular forms of theatrical pantomime and pamphlet. Whilst this is the primary focus of my research, early modern theatre, literary representations of the diabolic and occult, and the legacy of classical epic are among the topics in which I am currently conducting research.
Specifically, I am interested in the ways that literary underworlds and katabatic journeys are portrayed in the literature of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century. The period's cultural imagination was captivated by notions of Hell; from political pamphlet to literary satire, the residents of London could not help but conjure the city and society around them as the manifestation of a new underworld. Ned Ward went so far as to write that if “every Book to be supprest that has Hell or the Devil's Name in it, our Libraries would be very thin.” It is this literary phenomenon that forms the basis of my research.
In addition to this project, of which I intend my MA dissertation to form a chapter, I am currently researching the relationship between the Jacob Tonson publishing dynasty and the Miltonic canon; hopefully this project will continue, developing into an online resource for the study of Tonson and his texts.
Contact Information
| Address: | College of Humanities, |
| IM: | Twitter - @JosephFredHone |
