Paul Voss
Associate Professor English- Education
Ph.D., University of California at Riverside, 1995
- Specializations
Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare, the Archive
- Biography
Dr. Voss primarily teaches courses on poetry and prose of the English Renaissance, Shakespeare, and Bibliography. He encourages his students to appreciate the power and beauty of language while investigating the workings of the fictive imagination. In the classroom, Dr. Voss believes that academic pursuits need not preclude literary pleasure; he asks his students to participate actively in the exploration of aesthetic, philosophical, and epistemological questions.
Dr. Voss’s many research interests revolve around primary material published in Elizabethan England. He spends considerable time thinking in and about archives. His work on the history of the book and sixteenth-century woodcut illustrations studies the tension between iconography and iconoclasm. He is also interested in recusant literature and how the Catholic imagination operated in a largely inimical environment. He recently completed a book on Elizabethan news quartos–a series of pamphlets published in England between 1589-1593. The news quartos provide the earliest evidence of serial publication, colored the writings of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Spenser, and helped define an English national identity in the final decade of Tudor England.
Busted! How I became the owner of the world’s largest marble bust of Shakespeare.
It started with a rather modest desire: To find a bust of William Shakespeare for my Roman Garden (located down a small ridge in our backyard). The garden already had bronze statues (including Rodin’s The Thinker), marble columns, an impressive terra cotta amphora, and various other items intended to conjure the romance and history of the Eternal City.
I have spent almost 40 years reading, teaching, thinking about, and writing on Shakespeare, so a hagiographic bust seemed like an obvious choice. Shakespeare offers valuable insights into the human condition and topics such as love, death, ambition, forgiveness, salvation, damnation, power, attraction, revenge, and nearly every other human emotion and activity.
Every semester for 30 years at GSU, I have offered courses on Shakespeare to undergraduate and graduate students. I also teach a “Shakespeare in Italy” course during Maymester. It’s been an unmitigated pleasure.
But little did I know that the exquisite $500 marble sculpture (previously displayed in the Paterno Library at Penn State University) would require a massive effort to relocate and erect. The epic journey of 767 miles did not get interesting (and expensively complicated) until two crates weighing over 1500 pounds arrived on my driveway. I had no idea that it was the largest marble bust of Shakespeare in the world; I had less than no idea of how I would move this colossus to my garden.
For those with the time and inclination, the quixotic details of the relocation can be found at www.ethikos.com. It’s been quite an epic adventure, but now the depth of this relationship—open and public for everyone to see—sits proudly in my Roman Garden.
- Publications
“Print Culture, Ephemera, and Elizabethan News Pamphlets,” Literature Compass (London: Blackwell’s) 3 (2006): 1053-64
Elizabethan News Pamphlets: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe & the Birth of Journalism. Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies Series (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press), 2001.
“Printing Conventions and the Early Modern Play.” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 15 (2003)
“To Prey or Not to Prey: Prayer and Punning in Hamlet.” Hamlet Studies 23 (2001): 59-74.
“John Fowler and Thomas More: The Making of a Saint, 1573.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 99:4 (October 2000): 492-512.
“‘Created Good and Faire': The Fictive Imagination and Sacred Texts in Elizabethan England.”Literature and Theology 14 (June 2000): 125-44.
“The Catholic Presence in English Renaissance Literature.” Ben Jonson Journal 7 (2000): 1-26.
“The Poetics of the Archive.” Ed. with Marta Werner, Studies in the Literary Imagination 32 (Spring 1999).
“Books for Sale: Patronage and Advertising in Late Elizabethan England.” Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (October 1998): 733-56.