Robert A. Erickson

Robert A. Erickson

Areas of Interest

• Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British literature
• Literature and religion
• Literature and medicine

Books and Recent Articles

• “Swift, Sterne, and the Anglican Sermon Performed” in Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Lawrence Sterne, ed. W. B. Gerard (Newark: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming, 2009).
• “On the External Uses of Water in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker” in Tobias Smollett, Scotland’s First Novelist: New Essays in Memory of Paul-Gabriel Boucé, ed. by O M Brack, Jr. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), pp. 94-114.
• “Swift’s Dark Materials” in Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century in Honor of Everett Zimmerman, ed. Lorna Clymer and Robert Mayer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), pp. 164-83.
• “Milton and the Poetics of Ecstasy in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Fiction” in A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture, ed. Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp. 117-39.
• “Fictions of the Heart: Sterne, Law, and the Long Eighteenth Century” in Fiction and Religion, ed. David Blewett; special edition of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 15, 3-4, April-July 2003, pp. 559-582.
• “Words of Power: Paradise Lost, Shamanism, and the Kalevala” in Styles and Positions: Ethnographic Perspectives in Comparative Religion, ed. Tuula Sakaranaho et.al. (Helsinki: Helsinki University, Comparative Religion 8, 2002, pp. 221-35).
• “‘Rapt Above the Pole’: Milton’s Paradise Lost and Shamanism” in Shamanhood: Symbolism and Epic, ed. Juha Pentikäinen (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 2001, pp. 221-35).
• “Ethnography and the Theater of the Body” in Ethnography is a Heavy Rite (Abo Academy Press, 2000).
• The Language of the Heart, 1600-1750. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
• “Lady Fulbank and the ‘Poet’s Dream’ in Aphra Behn's The Lucky Chance,” in Broken Boundaries, ed. Katherine M. Quinsey (University Press of Kentucky, 1996).
• “Mrs. A. Behn and the Myth of Oroonoko-Imoinda,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1993).
• “William Harvey’s De motu cordis and the ‘Republick of Literature,’” in Literature and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century, ed. Marie M. Roberts and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993).
• Mother Midnight: Birth, Sex, and Fate in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne) (New York: AMS Press, 1986).
• The History of John Bull, by John Arbuthnot (editor, with A. W. Bower). (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976)

Recent Reviews

• Ole M. Hoystad, A History of the Heart, in The Social History of Medicine, forthcoming 2009
• Eve Keller, Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England, in Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period, 13, 4, 2008, pp. 405-09
• Su Fang Ng, Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England, in Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, 32, 1, Spring 2008, pp. 63-65
• Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage, in Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period, 11, 2, 2006, pp. 237-39
• James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics and Literary Culture; Pamela Cheek, Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex, review essay in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 17, 2, January 2005, pp. 269-276

Current Projects

• The Poetics of Ecstasy, 1550-1750
• Pope as Poet of Rapture
• Cleland's Gospel of "Extasy"

Recent Course Offerings

• Libertine Literature and Eighteenth-Century Fiction
• Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
• The Poetics of Prophecy
• Milton and the Poetics of Ecstasy
• The Poetry of Domesticity
• “‘Words of Power’: The Shamanic Epic from Paradise Lost to the Kalevala,” undergraduate course in the University of Helsinki, department of Religious Studies, fall and spring, 1999-2000
• “Textual Interpretation,” doctoral seminar in the University of Helsinki, department of Religious Studies, fall and spring, 1999-2000