Emily Rowe

• English Literature, Language, and Linguistics, Newcastle University
• Email: e.c.rowe2@ncl.ac.uk

I am currently researching the materiality of language in early modern literature - exploring the ways words are described and experienced as material objects, and offering a linguistic response to the recent ‘material turn’ in the humanities. in which my field has become ‘obsessed with materiality’. Words can be coins to be exchanged, metals to be distilled and compounded, or clothes to be worn, and are often described as such by seventeenth-century prose writers and dramatists. This is being examined in the context of print culture (solidifying the word on the page), increasing language standardisation (more dictionaries and prescriptive meta-linguistic commentaries arise in this period) and early science. Writers such as Thomas Nashe, Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon show a reflexive awareness of the relationship between writing, speaking, and the material world, and my research combines literary, materialist, and linguistic approaches to the period to ask words and things have in common.

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Supervisory Team: Prof. Jennifer Richards, English Literature, Language and Linguistics (Newcastle), Prof. Karen Corrigan, English Literature, Language and Linguistics (Newcastle)

Start Date: September 2017