Helen Wilcox

Biography

Renaissance and early modern literature, contemporary writing (especially recent prize-winning texts and issues of literary taste), and interdisciplinary courses across the boundaries between literature and music, theology and the visual arts. I am happy to supervise postgraduates in all these areas, particularly those working on early modern literature and questions of genre, gender, and the contextualising and editing of early modern texts.

Research Interest

My research concentrates on three main areas of early modern English literature: devotional writing, particularly lyric poetry; Shakespeare, particularly the tragicomedies; and women’s writing, particularly poetry and autobiography. My work on devotional writing focuses on the religious poetry and prose written in English in the seventeenth century, a time of intense dilemmas over devotional identity. I have published many articles on the work of writers such as John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, George Herbert, An Collins, Henry Vaughan, ‘Eliza’ and their contemporaries.