Dr Peter Groves

Background

Peter Groves was educated in the UK at the universities of Exeter and Cambridge; he has been teaching at Monash University since 1980 (his main teaching interests are in poetry, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, and stylistics). He is the author of Strange Music: The Metre of the English Heroic Line (ELS 1998), and his work on metre and versification has been published in such international journals as Shakespeare, Style and Versification; he has also contributed several articles to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Semiotics.

Research Interests

One of the things that fascinates me about poems, plays and novels is the stuff they’re made out of: language. A writer is faced with complex choices in his or her use of language at every step, whether those choices are consciously noticed and resolved or not: this word or that, monosyllable or polysyllable, consonant clusters or long vowels, active or passive voice, this or that order of words, ellipsis or expansion, simile or metaphor, and so on. The cumulative result of these choices we call style, a crucial element in our reception of a text (and an important way of encoding covert ideological meaning), and the systematic and informed study of style is called stylistics. Of course, critics have always found it necessary to talk about language and style in one way or another, but (partly due to a long-standing divide in the English-speaking academic world between linguistic and literary studies) critical discussion of such matters has often been amateurish and impressionistic.

While I have general research interests in literary stylistics and translation studies, my particular passion is in 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: Edward Bysshe and the Triumph of Classroom Metrics for a historical account of this). Linguistic systems (such as the grammar or metre of your native language) are acquired ─ and function ─ below the threshold of conscious awareness, so that your knowledge of their rules, however complex, seems immediate and intuitive and for this reason beyond any need of analysis. Any speaker of English can see intuitively that while She made up the story can be (stylistically) re-ordered as She made the story up, She walked up the street cannot become She walked the street up; but only someone who has studied English grammar, however, can explain why. For this reason the traditional account of English metre makes (odd as it may seem) no attempt (and sees no need) to investigate how it actually works. I have written a book (Strange Music) which explains (I hope) the ‘grammar’ of the main English metre, iambic pentameter, and in a recent article (“Shakespeare’s Pentameter and the End of Editing”) I show how not only critics but scholarly editors of Shakespeare could benefit enormously from understanding that grammar. I am currently writing a book on speaking Shakespeare’s verse and working more generally on the theory of verse-movement.

Selected Publications