Our staff
Professor Bill Overton
Tel: +44 01509 222953
Role: Professor of Literary Studies
Email: W.J.Overton@lboro.ac.uk
Room NN.0.15, Martin Hall building, East Park
Publications
II have spent over thirty-five years of my career in this Department, and, though I have worked at other universities in the UK and the USA, I have always most enjoyed working here. I am equally interested in research and teaching.
My current research interests are chiefly in British verse of the period 1680–1800. Recent publications include a book, The Eighteenth-Century British Verse Epistle, and three journal essays: two on the verse of Aphra Behn, Aphra Behn and the verse epistle and Aphra Behn’s versification, and one on voice and gender in the verse of John, Lord Hervey (1696–1743). Forthcoming publications include an essay on ideas of death and futurity in Hervey’s writings and on the language of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. Currently most of my research is on Hervey’s verse, in particular for a critical edition to be published by Cambridge University Press. This has been generously supported by study leave from Loughborough University and by a Research Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
While I am interested in all aspects of verse in English during this period, I have also published books and articles on a wide range of other topics, including Shakespeare, nineteenth-century Continental European fiction, and the importance of versification in the teaching of poetry. These topics are reflected in my range of teaching interests. Most recently they have included, at undergraduate level, responsibility for two Year 1 core modules in poetry, and for optional Year 2 and Year 3 modules in eighteenth-century British poetry and narrative and in nineteenth-century French and Russian fiction in translation; but I have also contributed to team-taught modules in critical theory and British drama from Shakespeare to the early eighteenth century. The modules for which I am responsible reflect two of my key beliefs: that it is important to understand how poems work metrically, and to gain knowledge of works first written in other languages than English.
At postgraduate level, I have had responsibility for teaching two modules in eighteenth-century literature. I have recently supervised successful PhD theses on the representation of female desire in female-authored texts 1680–1725; Thomas Hardy and music; the life and work of John Theophilus Desaguliers – a revised version of which has been published by Continuum Press; and a narratological analysis of the narratives of Eliza Haywood. Current PhD projects I am supervising are on the language of Sensibility and on the concept of beauty in eighteenth-century verse, 1740–60.