Prof. Dr. Lauren Shohet

CV

Lauren Shohet (Ph. D. Brown University [USA], 1995) is Professor of English at Villanova University (Pennsylvania, USA), specializing in early-modern English poetry and drama, the history of material texts, and the theory of literary form. She is the author of Reading Masques: The English Masque and Public Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010) and the editor of the Barnes and Noble Shakespeare Series Timon of Athens (forthcoming). Her many articles and essays on adaptation, form, reading, and works of Milton, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and early-modern women poets have appeared in such venues as Shakespeare Survey, Studies in English Literature, Milton Studies, the Journal of Early-Modern Cultural Studies, and The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy. The recipient of fellowships and prizes from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Folger Shakespeare Library, German Academic Exchange Service, Fulbright Foundation, Huntington Library, Mellon Foundation, and Shakespeare Association of America, she has particular interests in Anglo-German-French literary relations and in relationships among form, history, and reading

Publikationen (Auswahl):

Books and Editions

• Reading Masques: The English Masque and Public Culture in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, ed. Lauren Shohet. Barnes & Noble Shakespeare series, gen. ed. David Scott Kastan. Forthcoming.

Articles

• “Teaching Paradise Lost Through Contemporary Adaptations.” Approaches to Teaching Milton’s Paradise Lost, 2nd ed., ed. Peter C. Herman. New York: MLA, forthcoming 2011.
• “Doing Genre.” With Group Phi. New Formalism, ed. Verena Theil and Linda Tredennick. Under consideration at Fordham University Press.
• "Usable Archives," Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010), 68-76.
• “Women’s Elegy: Early Modern.” Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 433-41.
• “Kenneth Burke’s Words.” Western Humanities Review 63:1 (Winter 2009): 63-70.
• “His Dark Materials, Paradise Lost, and the Common Reader.” Milton in Popular Culture, ed. Laura Knoppers and Gregory Colon Semenza. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 58-70.
• “Reading Triumphs: Localizing Caroline Masques.” Localizing Caroline Drama. Ed. Adam Zucker and Alan Farmer. New York: Palgrave, 2006, pp. 69-96.
• “The Masque in/as Print.” The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Marta Straznicky. Studies in Early Modern Culture series, vol. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2006, pp. 176-202.
• “Subjects and Objects in Lycidas,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 47:2 (Spring 2005): 101-19.
• “Reading Dark Materials.” His Dark Materials Illuminated. Ed. Millicent Lenz. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 2005, pp. 22-36.
• “Reading / Genres: Mid-Caroline Masques.” Spectacle and Public Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Ed. Robert Stillman. New York: Brill, 2005, pp 231-248.
• “The Banquet of Scotland (PA).” Shakespeare Survey 57, 2004: The Afterlife of Macbeth, ed. Peter D. Holland, pp. 186-195.
• “The Masque as Book.” Reading and Literacy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Ed. Ian Moulton. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, vol. 8. Brussels: Brepols, 2004, pp. 143-168.
• “Reading History with Samson Agonistes,” Milton Studies 41 (2002): 94-116.
• “Shakespeare’s Eager Adonis.” Studies in English Literature 42, 1 (Winter 2002): 85-102.
• ---. Rpt. in Shakespearean Criticism, vol. 79. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Press, 2004, pp. 357-364.
• “Interpreting The Irish Masque at Court and in Print.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 1, 2 (Fall/Winter 2001): 42-65.
• “Figuring Chastity: Milton’s Ludlow Masque.” Menacing Virgins: Representing Rape in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Kelly and Marina Leslie. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1999, pp. 146-164.

encyclopedia entries

• "Robert White." Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, gen. eds. Alan Stewart and Garrett Sullivan. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Forthcoming.
• "Thomas Campion." Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, gen. eds. Alan Stewart and Garrett Sullivan. Wiley-Blackwell. London: Forthcoming.

reviews

• Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture. Renaissance Quarterly 63,1 (Spring 2010).
• Wendy Olmstead, The Imperfect Friend: Rhetoric and Emotion in Milton, Sidney, and their Contexts. Renaissance Quarterly 63,1 (Spring 2010).
• Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music. Shakespeare Quarterly 58:4 (Winter 2007): 553-54.
• William Kuskin, Caxton’s Chaucer. Journal of British Studies 46:1 (Spring 2007): 149-150.
• Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor, Shakespeare Quarterly 52:1 (Spring 2001), pp. 165-67.

FRIAS-Projekt

Overreading: Adaptation, Form, History

I will be working on problems of literary adaptation in and of Renaissance texts. I suggest that rather than understanding form and history dialectically, as literary studies too often do, a properly dynamic sense of form grants aesthetics full participation in history. I propose adaptation as a useful limit-case of genre that illuminates operations of aesthetic form more generally. I use ideas of distributed agency (particularly as articulated by Michel Serres and Michel de Certeau) to position explore convergences and divergences between textual and genetic adaptation, seeking areas where notions of latency, co-evolution, and biological spandrels illuminate texts' relationships to both specific sources and overarching generic profiles. Within this framework, I consider works of Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, and Marvell, both as adaptations of earlier traditions and as resources for ensuing works. In 2010-11, I will focus on how the mode of romance engages questions of adaptation, form, and history with salutary self-consciousness, and will be writing essays on Shakespeare's romance Pericles, as well as on repetition and romance in Milton's Paradise Lost; I also will undertake a translation of Hermann Cohen's chapter on the novel.