Dr Amanda Holton

Visiting Fellow

Dr Amanda Holton is a Visiting Fellow in English at the University of Southampton.

I took my undergraduate and graduate degrees at Oxford, and have worked at various Oxford colleges and at the University of Reading, where I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship from 2005 to 2007, and where I am now a Lecturer. I have been connected with Southampton since 2007, teaching modules chiefly in the areas of medieval and Renaissance literature. My main research interests are in Chaucer, the medieval and early Renaissance love lyric, and poetics, with an emphasis on the way form generates meaning.

Research

Publications

Contact

Research interests

I am currently working on a monograph on the role of rhyme in late medieval and early Renaissance love lyric. This shows how rhyme-words are an index of a poem’s preoccupations, and demonstrates how rhyme-groups capture and perpetuate a nexus of ideas which both characterize and determine the experience of love. I argue that the limited rhyme resources of English render certain clusters of words and ideas almost inevitable. As a result, groups of ideas which are linked by the essentially arbitrary element of rhyme come to determine features of the experience of love in poetry. I also plan to investigate whether the words involved in these rhyme-clusters appear in higher-than-expected concentrations in subsequent non-fictional prose writing about love: if this is the case, this would indicate that poetic form has an important function in determining the conception and experience of love beyond, as well as within, poetry.

My next project will consider the cultural and linguistic footprints which medieval and early modern amatory discourse has left in a wide range of twenty-first-century ‘real-life’ British texts which express love. This will be an ambitious attempt to reveal the way that our most intimate, private, and deeply-felt experiences are constructed through historically-determined cultural and linguistic conventions.

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Books

Tottel's Miscellany: A New Edition (London: Penguin, 2011), with Tom MacFaul

The Sources of Chaucer’s Poetics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008)

Edition of Margaret Cavendish, The Sociable Companions (Oxford: Seventeenth Century Press, 1996)

Articles

‘An obscured tradition: the sonnet’s relationship to its fourteen-line predecessors’, Review of English Studies , 62 (2011), 373-92.

‘Ruth in Surrey’s Windsor Elegy’, Notes and Queries 56 (2009), 29-33 (with Tom MacFaul)

‘Resistance, Regard and Rewriting: Virginia Woolf and Anne Thackeray Ritchie’, English 57 (2008), 42-64

‘Which Bible Did Chaucer Use? The Biblical Tragedies in the Monk’s Tale’, Notes and Queries 55 (2008), 13-17

‘Chaucer’s Use of Pronominatio’, Reading Medieval Studies 33 (2007), 69-86.

Book Section

‘Chaucer’s presence in Songes and Sonettes’ in Stephen Hamrick (ed.), Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 87-110

Reviews

Review of K. Rooney, Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature , in The Medieval Journal (forthcoming 2013)

Review of William T. Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch , in Medium Aevum , 80 (2011), 136-7

Dr Amanda Holton
Student Office, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Southampton, Avenue Campus, Southampton. SO17 1BF United Kingdom

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