Robert A. Erickson (Ph.D., Yale, 1966) Professor, English Department U. California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170 tel: (805) 893-2453 fax: (805) 893-4622 email: erickson@english.ucsb.edu

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

• “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 Bouce, 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 Univ., Comparative Religion 8, 2002, pp. 221-35.
• "'Rapt Above the Pole': Milton's Paradise Lost and Shamanism" in Shamanhood: Symbolism and Epic, ed. Juha Pentikainen, Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 2001, pp. 221-35.
• "Ethnography in 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 (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 (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.

Current Projects

• The Poetics of Ecstasy, 1550-1750
• Pope as Poet of Rapture
• Swift, Sterne, and the Anglican Sermon Performed
• Cleland's Gospel of "Extasy"

Recent Courses Taught

• Libertine Literature and Eighteenth-Century Fiction
• Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
• The Poetics of Prophecy
• Milton and the Poetics of Ecstasy
• 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