Professor Henry Power

I was an undergraduate at Oxford, and initially studied Classics before realising that what really excited me about Greek and Latin literature was the way it had been reimagined by later writers. I switched to Classics and English after a year, and have been thinking about the relationship between ancient and modern literature ever since. My PhD (which I did at Cambridge) was on the classical sources of Henry Fielding’s great novel, Tom Jones.

Teaching

At St Peter’s, I teach papers covering the period 1550-1830. I enjoy introducing students to a mixture of canonical and non-canonical texts, and always try to make sure that I’m teaching something that’s new to me: there’s a lot to be said for discovering a work of literature alongside one’s students.

Research

I’m interested in the afterlives of ancient texts and ideas—that is, the way they’ve been interpreted and reimagined by (mostly) English-speaking writers. My particular focus has tended to be the literature of the long eighteenth century, and I’m especially interested in authors who are immersed both in classical literature and in the messy and often disreputable world of satire and print culture. The authors I’ve worked on, and continue to work on, include Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mary Wortley Montagu, Joseph Addison, and Henry Fielding.

My most recent book, Homer-Haunted, is about the way in which English poetry has been shaped by engagement with the Homeric poems over the past 400 years. I start with George Chapman, the first English translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and end up by looking at some contemporary poets, including Alice Oswald, Sasha Dugdale and A.E. Stallings. I spend a lot of time thinking about Homer at the moment, as I’m also editing Pope’s translation of the Iliad for the new Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope.

Selected publications

Henry Power, Homer-Haunted: The Many Afterlives of an Ancient Poet (Bloomsbury, 2026).

Henry Power (ed.), Alexander Pope: The Major Works. Oxford 21st-Century Authors (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Henry Power (ed., with Nicholas McDowell), The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640-1714 (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Henry Power, ‘Ancient Influences on the Essay’ in The Cambridge History of the British Essay, ed. Denise Gigante and Jason Childs (Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 3-17.

Henry Power, ‘Traffic with the Ancients’ in The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature, ed. Matthew Augustine and Steven Zwicker (Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 617-37.

Henry Power, Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015).