“Of primary importance . . . are the fundamental notions of the vital movement – expressed in literal and figurative narratives – of the heart and blood, the ambivalent scriptural heart and its relation to gender and sexuality, and the enduring connection between the trope of the heart and the activity of language, spoken and written.”

— from The Language of the Heart, 1600-1750 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997)

Robert Erickson is a Professor in the English Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1966, and his central interests include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature; literature and religion; and literature and medicine. He is the author of The Language of the Heart (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); the author of Mother Midnight: Birth, Sex, and Fate in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (AMS Press, 1986); and co-editor of John Arbuthnot’s The History of John Bull (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). Professor Erickson is currently working on “Sacred Rage,” a study of Donne, Milton, Pope, and the poetics of ecstasy.