Professor Terence Cave
Professor Terence Cave
Emeritus Research Fellow
Email: Professor Terence Cave
Research Interests
I have devoted most of my career to the study of early modern French literature and thought. Among my major publications in this area are the following: Devotional Poetry in France 1570-1613 (Cambridge University Press, 1969), The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1979 and reprints; French translation 1997), Pré-histoires: textes troublés au seuil de la modernité (Geneva, Droz, 1999), and Pré-histoires II: langues étrangères et troubles économiques au XVIe siècle (Geneva, Droz, 2001). I am also the editor of Thomas More's 'Utopia' in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts (Manchester University Press, 2008). In addition, I have translated and edited Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, The Princesse de Montpensier and the Comtesse de Tende for Oxford World's Classics (1992). However, I have always taken a wider interest in European literature and the history of poetics. My principal contribution here is my book Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988 and reprints), but I have also prepared editions of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (Penguin Books, 1995) and Silas Marner (Oxford World's Classics, 1996). Together with Sarah Kay and Malcolm Bowie, I am the joint author of A Short History of French Literature (Oxford University Press, 2003). In December 2001, I took early retirement in order to concentrate on my research. My current project is "Mignon's Afterlives", a study of the various ways in which the character Mignon, from Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, is transformed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature, theatre, song and opera.
