Curriculum Vitae – John Gouws
Title / Name
History
Publications
Prof John Gouws
John Gouws was educated at Rhodes University and the University of
Oxford. After twenty-eight years of teaching in the Department of English
at Rhodes University, he retired as Professor Emeritus.
He is now Professor Extraordinary at North-West Univesity. His main
interests are Early Modern English Literature, scholarly editorial theory
and practice, the History of the Book. He also has an interest in the work
of Wallace Stevens and Deneys Reitz. His main publications are a critical
edition of the prose works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554-1628) for
the Clarendon Press, and an edition of the poems of Nicholas Oldisworth
(1611-1645) for the Renaissance English Text Society. At present he is
engaged in a major project for the Clarendon Press: a four-volume edition
of Fulke Greville's literary works, of which he is the General Editor and the
editor of the prose works volume.
He would be interested in hearing from research students and
researchers who would like to undertake critical editing and book history
projects in any period. In particular, he invites anyone interested in
collaborating either as a researcher or as a graduate student in an
electronic, multi-disciplinary critical edition of Deneys Reitz's Commando
which was originally written in Cape Dutch at the end of the Anglo-Boer
War and twenty-five years later revised and rewritten in English. It has
continually been in print since then, and become a classic account of
guerrilla warfare, and consulted by many, including Nelson Mandela.
“The True Renaissance Gentleman” (A review of A.C. Hamilton, Sir Philip
Sidney: A Study of His Life and Works), The Times Literary Supplement, 19
August 1977, pp.998-99.
“Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, ll. 875-92”. Notes and Queries,
228 (1983), 302.
“Further Notes on a Seventeenth Century Miscellany”. Quarterly Bulletin
of the South African Library, 38 (1984), 124-30.
“Milton’s ‘Three and Twentieth Year’”. Notes and Queries, 229 (1984),
305-7.
“Antipodean Herrick: Poems in a Manuscript Miscellany”. Seventeenth
Century News, 43 (1985), 7.
Review of P.J. Croft, ed., The Poems of Robert Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1984), in Notes and Queries, 230 (1985), 518-9.
The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1986. [Reviewed in The London Review of Books, 3 July 1986, pp. 19-11;
Times Literary Supplement, 15 August 1986, p. 859; The Review of English
Studies, 38 (1987), 385-6.]
“Fact and Anecdote in Fulke Greville’s Account of Sidney’s Last Days”. Sir
Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend, ed. Jan van Dorsten et
al. (Leiden: E.J. Brill / Leiden University Press, 1986), pp.62-82.
Review of G. Hammond, ed., Sir Walter Ralegh: Selected Writings
(Manchester: Carcanet, 1984), in Notes and Queries, 231 (1986), 410-ll.
Review of Jonathan Crewe, Hidden Designs: The Critical Profession and
Renaissance Literature (London: Methuen, 1986), in Notes and Queries,
233 (1988), 217-8.
Review of Susanne Woods, Natural Emphasis: English Versification from
Chaucer to Dryden (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1984), in Sidney
Newsletter, 8:1 (1987), 26-8.
Review of Don E. Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the
Poetics of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) in Sidney
Newsletter, 8:1 (1987), 44-6.
Review of M.G. Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance:
The Pembroke Family (London: Routledge, 1988), in Notes and Queries,
234 (1989), 499-500.
“The Significance of the Nineteenth-century Development of the Sidney
Legend”, in Sir Philip Sidney’s Achievements, (New York: AMS, 1990), ed.
M.J.B. Allen et al., pp.252-60.
Review of L.S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its
Discontents. (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, vol. 6)
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, in Notes and Queries, 235
(1990), 220-221.
The Pursuit of Poetry: A Defence. Grahamstown: Rhodes University, 1990.
[ISBN 0-86810-205-9]
“Shakespeare, Webster and the Moriturus Lyric in Renaissance England”,
Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 3 (1989), 45-57.
“Foucault and Shakespeare’s Pedants, Dotards and Drunks”, Literator,
11.3 (1990), 29-41.
Review of Edmund Spenser, The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems, ed.
W.A. Oram, et al. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), in
Notes and Queries, 235 (1990), 462-3.
“Dressing Malvolio for the Part”, Notes and Queries, 236 (1991), 478-9.
“Narrative Strategy and Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella”, The Southern
African Journal for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2.1 (1991), 67-82.
Review of Dennis Kay, Melodious Teares: The English Funeral Elegy from
Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), in Notes and Queries
236 (1991), 531-2.
“The Pursuit of Poetry”, Crux, 26.1 (1992), 39-50.
Review of Joan Rees, Sir Philip Sidney and “Arcadia” (Rutherford: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 1991), in Notes and Queries 237 (1992), 502.
“Nicholas Oldisworth (1611-1645)”, English Academy Review, 9 (1992).
“Nicholas Oldisworth and Bodleian MS Don.c.24”. Boldleian Library
Record, 15.3 (1995),158-65.
“Shut, shut the door, good John”: Alexander Pope and the Challenge of
Exclusion”. UNISA English Studies, 33.1 (1995), 1-5.
Review of Joseph H. Summers, Collected Essays on Renaissance Literature,
George Herbert Journal, Special Studies and Monographs, 1993; and
David Lee Miller, Sharon O”Dair and Harold Weber, eds., The Production
of English Renaissance Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 1994). Notes and Queries, 241 (1996), 84-5.
“Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Vol.
172, Sixteenth-Century British Nondramatic Writers, ed. David A.
Richardson. Detroit: Gale Research, 1996. Pp. 105-115
Review of David Johnson, Shakespeare and South Africa. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1966). Notes and Queries, 242 (1997), 554-5.
Review of Raymond A. Anselment, The Realms of Apollo: Literature and
Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Newark: University of Delaware
Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1995) and Jonathan
Sawday, The Body Emblazoned:Dissection and the Human Body in
Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Notes and
Queries, 242 (1997), 556-8.
“Fulke Greville’s A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney and the Protocols of
Textual Scholarship”, English Manuscript Studies, 6 (1997), 114-39.
“Shakespeare and the Self: Being true to Hamlet”, Shakespeare in
Southern Africa, 9 (1996 [1998]), 32-40.
Review of H.R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of
Manuscripts, 1558-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), in Renaissance
Quarterly, LI (1998), 1031-33.
Review of Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia” and
Elizabethan Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996)
and Martin Garrett (ed.), Sidney: The Critical Heritage, The Critical
Heritage Series (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), in Notes and
Queries, 244 (1999), 111-13.
Review of Lisa M Klein, The Examplary Sidney and the Elizabethan
Sonneteer (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated
University Presses, 1998), in Notes and Queries, 245 (2000): 233-34.
Review of Tom W N Parker, Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney
Circle: Loving in Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), in Notes and
Queries, 245 (2000), 234-35.
Review of Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton and Eighteenth-Century
Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), in Shakespeare Studies in Southern
Africa, 11 (1998 [2000]), 59-61.
Review of Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern
England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and
Milton (Cambridge, New York, Oakleigh: Cambridge University Press,
1999) in Notes and Queries, 246,2 (2001), 193.
“Fulke Greville”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 2004.
“Nicholas Oldisworth”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford,
2004.
“Deneys Reitz and Imperial Co-option”, Books and Empire: Textual
Production, Distribution and Consumption in Colonial and Postcolonial
Countries, ed. Paul Eggert and Elizabeth Webby (Wellington:
Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, 2004)[ISBN 09751500-1-4], 73-82.
“Nicholas Oldisworth (1611-1645) and the Westminster School Poets”,
Southern African Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 13
(2003)[2005], 57-70.
“Nicholas Oldisworth and the complex, multilayered cultures of
seventeenth century Gloucestershire”,Southern African Journal of
Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 14(2004)[2006], 91-113.
“Book and Text Studies in Grahamstown”, English Studies in Africa, 47.1
(2004), 119-24.
“Sidney’s ‘Old’ Arcadia as Polymorphous Text: a Case Study of the
Phillipps Manuscript”, TEXT: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies,
17 (2005), 93–116.
Review of Thomas Carper and Derek Attridge, Meter and Meaning: An
Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry (New York and London: Routledge, 2003)
in Notes and Queries, 250 (2005), 130-131.
Review of Michael G Brennan and Noel J Kinnamon, A Sidney Chronology
1554-1564 (New York, Basingstoke, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003),
and Elizabeth Mazzola, Favorite Sons: The Politics and Poetics of the
Sidney Family (New York, Basingstoke, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
in Notes and Queries, 250 (2005), 249-51.
“Nicholas Oldisworth, Richard Bacon, and the Practices of Caroline
Friendship” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 47 (2005), 366401.
Review of Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon and Michael Brennan,
eds. Domestic Politics and Family Absence: The Correspondence (15991621) of Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester, and Barbara Gamage
Sidney, Countess of Leicester. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate
Publishing, 2005, in Notes and Queries, 54 (2007): 106-107.
“Religious authority and poetic knowledge: the alternative of Nicholas
Oldisworth's farewell to poetry”, Southern African Journal of Medieval
and Renaissance Studies 17 (2007 [2009]): 41-55.
“A Celebration of Book History in Africa”. English in Africa 35.1 (2008): 58
‘Why “Text Happens” won’t do for Fulke Greville (or anyone else)’,
Variants 6 (2007[2009]): 15-32. [Revised version of plenary address at
ESTS conference, November 2006]
Nicholas Oldisworth’s Manuscript (Bodleian MS. Don.c.24). Tempe,
Arizona: ACMRS in conjunction with Renaissance English Text Society,
2009.
“The Date of Milton's Sonnet VII”, accepted for publication by Notes and
Queries 57 (2010): 39-41.
“Nicholas Oldisworth and William Davenant: Moors and Slaves in Early
Modern England”, Notes and Queries 57(2010):36-37.
“A seventeenth-century Sidney allusion”, Notes and Queries 57(2010):
421-422.
“The Cape Colony’s earliest subscription library” in New Word Order:
Transnational Themes in Book History, ed. Swapan Chakravorty and
Abhijit Gupta (New Delhi: Worldview, 2011: 127-136.
"Narrative Strategies in Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella," Literator
31.3 (2010): 61-78)
"Wallace Stevens's Use of Narrative Markers in Harmonium," Literator
31.3 (2010): 161-180)
"The Textual Trek of Deneys Reitz's Commando." Variants: Journal of the
European Society for Textual Scholarship 9 (2012): 185-198.
“Deneys Reitz and Imperial Co-option." In Print, Book and Text Cultures in
South Africa. Ed. Andrew van der Vlies. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand
University Press (2012): 110-120.
Review of Matthew Woodcock, Sir Philip Sidney and the Sidney Circle.
(Writers and Their Work). Northcote House Publishers Ltd, 2010). Notes
and Queries, 59 (2012): 592-594.
“An Early Sidney Allusion”. Notes and Queries 59 (2012): 524-525.
"Editing 'a mute inglorious Milton' of Gloucestershire: Nicholas
Oldisworth" in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, V: Papers of the
Renaissance English Text Society 2007-2011, ed. Michael Denbo. Tempe,
Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in
conjunction with the Renaissance English Text Soceity. [Due for
publication 2013]
“Deneys Reitz and the Bounds of Self-Understanding” in Crossing Borders,
Dissolving Boundaries, ed. Hein Viljoen (Amsterdam and New York:
Rodopi, 2013): 51-74.