Dr Peter Groves
PhD (University of Cambridge) BA (University of Exeter)
Peter Groves curriculum vitae [
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Biography
I was educated in the UK at the universities of Exeter and Cambridge, where I wrote my Ph.D on Shakespeare’s metrics. I came to Monash in 1980 (for a two-year appointment!) and now teach poetry, Shakespeare and other Renaissance English literature in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies. My publications on metre include a theoretical monograph (Strange Music: The Metre of the English Heroic Line, ELS Monograph Series 74, Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1998), and a series of articles on poets from Chaucer to Philip Larkin; I have also published (with Dr Geoffrey Hiller) an edition of Samuel Daniel’s poetry and an annotated anthology of the seventeenth-century Theophrastan character. I am currently working on the theory of verse-movement.
Research interests
Stylistics
My main research interest is in stylistics, or the systematic and informed study of style. Style is the cumulative result of all the choices a writer must constantly make (monosyllable or polysyllable, active or passive, ellipsis or expansion, simile or metaphor), whether those choices are consciously noticed and resolved or not.
Metrics
My particular passion is metrics, or the rhythmical organization of poetry, the area of research that has suffered most from the linguistic incuriosity of critics precisely because it is the most linguistically embedded (see my article The Chomsky of Grub Street for a historical account of this).
Selected publications
- Groves, P. (2007) 'Shakespeare’s Pentameter and the End of Editing', Shakespeare, Vol 3 No.2, Pages 126-42.
- Groves, P. (2002) “‘Knocking a verse on the head": towards a performance grammar of English verse' in Küper, C. edited Metrum, Rhythmus, Performanz, Frankfurt-am-Main, Peter Lang. Pages 215-228.
- Groves, P. (2001) “What Music Lies in the Cold Print”: Larkin’s Experimental Metric'. Style, Vol 35, Pages 703-723.
- Groves, P. (2000) '"Water from the Well’: the Transmission and Reception of Chaucer’s Metric'. Parergon, Vol 17, Pages 51-73.
- Groves, P. (1998) Strange Music: The Metre of the English Heroic Line, Victoria, B.C, University of Victoria.