Jennifer Oliver
My research is centred on sixteenth-century French literature, culture, and thought. My first book, Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing: The Direful Spectacle (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the importance of narratives of shipwreck in the period, reading fictional and allegorical ‘naufrages’ alongside the eyewitness accounts of travel writers in order to explore the relationship between the material and the metaphorical.
My new project is concerned with how French writers of the sixteenth century (including Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, and Agrippa d’Aubigné) contemplated the connections and tensions between poetics, technology, and the natural environment. A first article on the subject, ‘Rabelais’s Engins: War Machines, Analogy, and the Anxiety of Invention in the Quart Livre’, was published in Early Modern French Studies (December 2016), and more recently a chapter on the ‘dark ecology’ of poetry of the French civil wars appeared in Early Modern Écologies, eds. Pauline Goul and Phillip John Usher (University of Amsterdam Press, 2020).
