Professor Colin Burrow FBA

Early Modern English Literature; relationships with classical literature, theory and practice of literary imitation, textual editing, literary history, Wyatt, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson and Milton.

Elected 2020

Fellow type: UK Fellow
Year elected: 2020
Sections: Early Modern Languages and Literatures to 1830
Website: https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-colin-burrow
http://www.calidore.plus.com/

Colin Burrow is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford. He is one of the editors of Review of English Studies, and is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books on topics ranging from antiquity to contemporary poetry. His principal area of research is the relationship between classical literature and English literature in the early modern period. He has edited the complete poems and Sonnets of Shakespeare and the complete poems of Ben Jonson. His most recent monograph, Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity, examines what it is for one author to imitate another, both in theory and in practice, from antiquity to the age of bot-poetry and beyond. He is working on the Elizabethan volume of the Oxford English Literary History.

Current post

Senior Research Fellow, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, All Souls College, Oxford

Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge Emeritus Fellow

Past appointments

University of Cambridge Reader in Renaissance and Comparative Literature

2003 - 2006

University of Cambridge Assistant Lecturer in English; Lecturer; Senior Lecturer

1989 - 2006

Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge Fellow

1987 - 2006

Top picks

On Paradise Lost

Audio

Milton's epic was first published 350 years ago. For Oxford academic Colin Burrow, it remains the best poem in English.

Dark Arcadias: the Fiction of Diana Wynne Jones

Audio

In the first of five essays about the history of an idea, the literary critic Colin Burrow explores fantasies in the children's stories of his late mother Dianna Wynne Jones.

Fiction and the Age of Lies

Video

Colin Burrow delivers the first of the LRB's 2020 Winter Lectures, from the British Museum. This lecture will aim to tell some (though not all) of the truth about the relationship between lies and fiction from Homer to Ian McEwan.

Publications

Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity

Colin Burrow - Published in 2019 by Oxford University Press

All authors learn from other authors. Some steal, some borrow. This study explores the theory and practice of imitatio from classical antiquity to the age of artificial intelligence. There are chapters on classical theory and practice, on Petrarch, Ben Jonson and on Milton, as well as sections on cloning and artificial humans in the work of Mary Shelley and beyond. Rather than limiting the practice of imitation to the classical tradition, the book argues that it remains fundamental to the ways in which poets learn practices from their predecessors, and to the way we think about literary relationships in the present.

Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity

Colin Burrow - Published in 2013 by Oxford University Press

Ben Jonson famously complained of Shakespeare's 'Small Latin and less Greek'. This book shows how big 'small' can be by exploring the depth and complexity of Shakespeare's engagement with classical writers, including Ovid, Virgil, Roman comedy and tragedy, as well as Plutarch. The book also shows how Shakespeare's engagement with classical antiquity changed in response to contemporary events and to contemporary authors, including Ben Jonson.

The Poems

Colin Burrow - Published in 2012 by Cambridge University Press

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

Metaphysical Poetry

Colin Burrow - Published in 2006 by Penguin

The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems

editor Colin Burrow, author William Shakespeare - Published in 2002 by Oxford University Press

Epic Romance: Homer to Milton

Colin Burrow - Published in 1993 by Oxford University Press

This study in the reception history of epic poetry shows how 'romance' forms lay buried within interpretations of classical epic, and how they emerge transformed in the work of Spenser, Milton and the dozens of translators and imitators of classical epic on which they drew.

Online media

Fiction and the Age of Lies

Article

London Review of Books,

Frog's Knickers: The Art of Swearing

Article

London Review of Books,

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