Professor Henry Power
Associate Dean of Education, Professor
4254
01392 724254
Overview
I started life - or academic life, anyway - as a classicist. When I went to Oxford in 1997, it was to study Greek and Latin (or Literae Humaniores, as they insisted on calling it). But I soon realised that what most excited me about ancient texts was the way they had been read and re-made in the modern world. So I switched to Classics and English. After a BA in Classics and English (2001) and an MSt in Greek and Latin Literature (2002), I went to Cambridge to write a PhD on the classical sources of Henry Fielding's great novel, Tom Jones.
Most of my work since then has been concerned with the reception of classical texts and ideas by English (or English-speaking) authors. I have a particular interest in English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but I also write about (and teach) recent and contemporary literature; one recent research project is on the Homeric translations of Christopher Logue (1926-2011). You can read my essay on Logue here.
After leaving Cambridge in 2005 I was briefly a research fellow at the Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition at the University of Bristol. I was then awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, which allowed me to spend time thinking about the reception of the Roman poet Virgil during the English Civil War. Since 2007 I have been teaching at the University of Exeter.
In 2015, I published Epic into Novel, a book which looks at the way classical literature was consumed in the first half of the eighteenth-century, with a particular focus on Henry Fielding. Fielding remains a major focus of my research, and I have just been contracted to edit (with Professor Thomas Keymer) the Oxford Handbook of Henry Fielding.
In 2018/19 I was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, which enabled me to work on an edition of Joseph Addison's prose works. Addison is best known for writing periodicals such as the Tatler and the Spectator. This edition (due to be published by OUP in 2025) will present a number lesser known works, in which Addison writes for a broad readership about the significance of classical art and literature.
One particular focus at the moment is the eighteenth-century poet and translator Alexander Pope. I have recently completed an edition of his major works, to be published later this year in the Oxford Twenty-First-Century Authors series. I am also editing Pope's translations from Homer for Oxford University Press.
In 2018 I was appointed to a personal chair. My inaugural lecture was on echoes of Homer in the works of Alexander Pope, John Keats, and Thom Gunn. It's available to read here. I now plan to write a more substantial study of the role Homeric translation and imitation has played in the development of English poetry, and have been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for this work (this will run for sixteen months from September 2024).
I have held visiting positions at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, at PKU in Beijing, at the Huntington Library in California, and at All Souls College, Oxford.
Research
- Seventeenth and eighteenth-century literature
- The reception of classical texts and ideas
- Theory and representation of landscape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
- The early English novel (especially those of Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, and Sterne)
- The poetry of the English civil war
- The epic tradition
- Satire and print culture
Publications
Copyright Notice: Any articles made available for download are for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the copyright holder.
| 2024 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2015 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 |
2024
- McDowell N. (2024) 'Keys', The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640-1714, Oxford University Press.
- McDowell N, Power H. (2024) The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640-1714, Oxford University Press.
2022
- Dyson M. (2022) Visible Translation: A Study of Christopher Logue's War Music.
2021
- Power H. (2021) Coins and Circulation in Addison's Prose, Joseph Addison Tercentenary Essays, Oxford University Press.
2020
- Power H. (2020) Homer and the Discovery of the Pacific: Gunn, Keats, Pope, The Review of English Studies, volume 72, no. 304, pages 355-371, DOI:10.1093/res/hgaa103. [PDF]
2019
- Power HCJ. (2019) "Eyes without Light": University Volumes and the Politics of Succession, Stuart Succession Literature Moments and Transformations, Oxford University Press, USA, 222-240, DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198778172.003.0012.
2018
- Power HCJ. (2018) "Now hear this": War Music in Performance, Epic Performances: from the middle ages to the twenty-first century, Oxford University Press, 250-261, DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198804215.003.0017.
- Power H. (2018) Christopher Logue, Alexander Pope, and the Making of War Music, The Review of English Studies, volume 69, no. 291, pages 747-766, DOI:10.1093/res/hgy039. [PDF]
2015
- Power HCJ. (2015) Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature, Oxford University Press, DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198723875.001.0001.
2012
- Power HCJ. (2012) ‘Homeric Tears and Eighteenth-Century Weepers’, Litteraria Pragensia, volume 46, pages 46-59.
- Power HCJ. (2012) The Classics and the English Novel, The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature: The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, OUP Oxford, 547-568.
- Power HCJ. (2012) 'The Classics and the English Novel', The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, 1660-1790, Oxford University Press, 547-568.
2011
- Power H. (2011) Homer's 'Odyssey', Edinburgh University Press.
2010
- Power HCJ. (2010) 'The Aeneid in the Age of Milton', A Companion to Vergil's Aeneid and Its Tradition, Wiley-Blackwell, 186-202.
- Power HCJ. (2010) Henry Fielding, Richard Bentley, and the 'sagacious Reader' of Tom Jones, Review of English Studies.
2009
- Power HCJ. (2009) Virgil, Horace, and John Gay's Art of Walking the Streets, Cambridge Quarterly, volume 38.4, pages 338-367.
2008
- Power HCJ. (2008) 'The Better Part of Henry Fielding', Henry Fielding in our Time, Scholars Press.
2007
- Power HCJ. (2007) 'Teares breake off my Verse': The Virgilian Incompleteness of Abraham Cowley’s The Civil War, Translation and Literature, volume 16:2, pages 141-159.
Teaching
Modules taught
- EAF2510 - Adaptation: Text, Image, Culture
- EAS1035 - Beginnings: English Literature before 1800
- EAS2026 - Desire and Power: English Literature 1570-1640
- EAS2036 - Theatrical Cultures in Early Modern England
- EAS2080 - Renaissance and Revolution
- EAS2102 - Satire and the City: English Literature 1660-1750
- EAS3414 - Jane Austen: In and Out of Context
- EASM142 - Revival and Return: Using the Past from Pope to Keats
More information
Together with my colleague Dr Ika Willis, I organised the workshop ‘Stories of the Novel: Ancient and Modern Narrative Forms’ in 2008 at the University of Bristol.