Texas Tech University

Matthew Hunter

Associate Professor
Early Modern Literature

Email: matthew.hunter@ttu.edu

I'm an early modernist specializing primarily in the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At Texas Tech, I teach a range of courses on Shakespeare, early modern drama, the history of British literature, and literary and social theory. In my research, I focus on tracking relationships between social life and aesthetic form. This overarching interest motivates my engagements with 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 David Scott Kastan, I recently edited a critical edition of Doctor Faustus for Norton (2023). With Allison Deutermann and Musa Gurnis, I 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 monograph on language and Shakespearean tragedy, tentatively entitled The Ends of Speech: Shakespeare's Tragedies of Expression.
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Books

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

Editions and Edited Collections

Doctor Faustus: Norton Critical Edition (Second Edition), co-edited with David Scott Kastan (Norton, 2023)  

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

Articles and Book Chapters

"Bombast Circumstance: Linguistic Creativity and Aesthetic Judgment in Early Modern Tragedy" ELH 91.1 (Spring, 2024), 29-59.

“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,” ELH  83.2 (Summer, 2016), 457-488.  

Reviews

“Charles Taylor’s Sublime Disappointments,” for The Chronicle Review (2024)

“The Ironies of Style,” for Los Angeles Review of Books (2017)

Department of English

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