I'm an early modernist specializing primarily in the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Throughout my research, I'm focused on tracking relationships between social life and aesthetic form, which has motivated related interests in performance theory, ordinary language philosophy, anthropology (particularly metapragmatics), social theory, aesthetics, and the history of literary criticism. My first book, The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama: Forms of Talk on the London Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2022), shows how early modern plays codified different styles of talk as different forms of stranger sociability in the newly public world of early modern London. With Allison Deutermann and Musa Gurnis, I co-edited the essay collection Publicity and the Early Modern Stage: Persons Made Public (Palgrave Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2021). Other work has appeared in Representations, ELH, and English Literary Renaissance. I am currently working on a new critical edition of Doctor Faustus (under contract with Norton) and a book on linguistic creativity and early modern tragedy. 

Books

The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama: Forms of Talk on the London Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2022) 

Publicity and the Early Modern Stage: People Made Public, co-edited with Allison K. Deutermann and Musa Gurnis (Palgrave, 2021)

Doctor Faustus: Norton Critical Edition (Second Edition), co-edited with David Scott Kastan (Norton, forthcoming)  

Articles and Book Chapters

"Bombast Circumstance: Linguistic Creativity and Aesthetic Judgment in Early Modern Tragedy" (forthcoming, ELH).

“Bodies Public: The Roaring Girl and the Rise of Celebrity,” in Publicity and The Early Modern Stage: People Made Public (Palgrave, 2021), 187-216 

“Talk that Talk: Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and the Seductions of a Form,” Representations 148 (2019), 1-29. 

“City Comedy, Public Style,” English Literary Renaissance 46.3 (Autumn, 2016), 401-432.

“Measure for Measure and the Problem of Style,” English Literary History 83.2 (Summer, 2016), 457-488. 

Assistant Professor
English Literature

Email: matthew.hunter@ttu.edu