PhD student research interests
LIAM HAYDON
Thesis (working title): '"I sing"? Narrative Techniques in Epic Poetry'
Supervisor: Dr. Jerome de Groot
Background:
2004-7: BA (Hons) English, Queen's University, Belfast
2007-8: MA English and American Studies, University of Manchester
(Dissertation: '"By ill imitating would excel"? Denham, Dryden, and the creation of an 'Early Modern' Vergil')
Research
My thesis investigates the narrative techniques in epic poetry, especially Milton's Paradise Lost and Regained. It demonstrates that the narrative 'voice' is actually a collection of conflicting heteroglossia, rather than the fixed and stable element of the text, as it is presented by much modern criticism. The thesis will therefore answer the two connected questions 'What makes the narrative voice unstable?' and 'Of what voices is it composed?' I suggest that epic poetry is characterised by the attempt to narrate a cultural matrix of civil strife, which prevents the creation of a single, stable voice. I examine the Miltonic narrator, especially the pattern of invocation, and outline competing heteroglossia in its utterances
I also demonstrate that Milton's intertextual relation with his epic predecessors as well as his seventeenth-century political and religious context creates an apparently incoherent meta-language of allusion, only explicable using a multivocal model. This work is placed alongside research on contemporaneous pamphlet publishing and the composition and circulation of manuscript translations of Vergil (particularly those by Denham and Dryden), locating Milton as part of an emergent culture of polyvocality.
My thesis adopts a interdisciplinary approach spanning literary theory, history and linguistics, as well as recent work on the material culture of the seventeenth century. It thus demonstrates that the tensions with Milton's texts are a result of attempting to engage with, and simultaneously being engaged by, the context which produces them.
Other Interests
My other interests include translation (both literary translation and wider cultural translation/appropriation), William Blake, and Jorge Luis Borges. Please feel free to contact me about any of the above.
My email address is: Liam.Haydon@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk