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Department of English Language and Literature

Directory

Edward Gieskes

Title: Professor
Department: English Language and Literature
College of Arts and Sciences
Email: gieskese@sc.edu
Phone: 803-576-5909
Office: HUO 401
Resources: English Language and Literature
profile

Education 

PhD, Boston University, 1999
MA, Boston University, 1991
BA, University of California, Berkeley, 1990

Specialization 

    Shakespeare
    Early modern drama
   • Theatre history
   • The Bakhtin circle
   • Literary and cultural theory

Courses 

ENGL 404—English Renaissance Drama, excluding Shakespeare
ENGL 406—Shakespeare’s Comedies and Histories
ENGL 405—Shakespeare’s Tragedies
ENGL 713--Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline Drama

Research Projects 

I am writing a book-length study of generic change in early modern English drama tentatively titled: "'Not marching in fields of Trasimene'": Generic Innovation in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries." The book investigates the sources of generic changes that alter the shape of the dramatic field in the later 1580s and the early decades of the seventeenth century. Simultaneously, I will be concerned with the history of the reception of those changes - the ways later audiences, performers, and scholars have understood generic change at the turn of the century. The book will thus be both a history of generic innovation in early modern England and a history of the uses to which those innovations have been put by later writers and scholars. At the same time, the book will offer an intervention in the ongoing discussion of the theory of genre.

Other projects include an essay on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Francis Bacon, and the New Science called “Profit and Delight”:  Marlowe’s Faustus, the New Science, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment” and a series of essays on the reception and deployment of Classical Latin poetry in early modern England.

Publications 

BOOKS
    Representing the Professions:  Administration, Law and Theatre in Early Modern England.  Newark, DE:  University of Delaware Press, 2006.
    Writing Robert Greene: New Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer.  Essay Collection co-edited with Kirk Melnikoff.  Burlington, VT:  Ashgate, 2008.

ESSAYS
    “Tradition and Genre:  Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy” in Bakhtin and His Others:  (Inter)Subjectivity, Chronotope, Dialogism.  Edited by Liisa Steinby and Tintti Klapuri. London:  Anthem, 2013
    “Women Beware Women and Genre Theory” Women Beware Women A critical guide.  Andrew Hiscock. ed.  New York:  Continuum, 2011.
    “Chaucer (of all admired) the story gives”:  Shakespeare, Medieval Narrative and Generic Innovation” Renaissance Papers 2009.  Rochester:  Camden House, 2010.
    “Staging Professionalism in Greene’s James IV” in Writing Robert Greene: New Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer.  Co-edited with Kirk Melnikoff.  Burlington, VT:  Ashgate, 2008
    “’From Wronger and Wronged Have I Fee’: Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Legal Culture.”  In Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, New York & London: Oxford University Press (Clarendon), 2008.
    "Honesty and Vulgar Praise: The Poet’s War and the Literary Field." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 17 (2005).
    "'He is but a Bastard to the time': Status and Service in The Troublesome Raigne of John and Shakespeare’s King John." ELH65.4(Winter 1998): 779-798.

Recent Presentations 

    “History, Comedy, Tragedy:  Middleton’s Intervention in the Genre System”  Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting, St. Louis, MO 2014.
    “Profit and Delight:  Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the New Science” 7th International Marlowe Conference, Staunton VA June 2013
    “‘The right time for narrating’:  Narrative, Timing, and Transformation in Ovid and Shakespeare.”  Shakespeare Association Annual Meeting, Toronto, Canada, April 2013.
    Co-led “The University Wits and the Late-Elizabethan Culture of Writing” seminar at the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, 2012.
    “Rumour’s Household, Old Plays, History.”  Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting, Bellevue, WA 2011.
    “‘What’s aught but as ‘tis valued’:  Troilus and Cressida and ‘History.’”  Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL 2010.
    ““Chaucer (of all admired) the story gives”:  Shakespeare, Medieval Narrative and Generic Innovation.”  Southeastern Renaissance Conference, Columbia SC 2009.
    “‘To pass the flowing stream of Acheron’:  Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Generic Change.”  International Conference on Genre Theory, Helsinki, Finland 2009. 


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