Eric Eisner

Eric Eisner

Eric Eisner

Associate Professor

18th and 19th century British literature and culture, esp. Romanticism; lyric poetry; history of reading; literary and cultural theory

Eric Eisner's teaching and research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, especially Romanticism; lyric poetry; and the history of authorship and of reading. His first book, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity (2009), treats Byron, Keats, P.B. Shelley, L.E.L., and Barrett Browning, among other poets. He edited a volume of essays on Romantic Fandom in the Romantic Circles Praxis series. He is currently working on a book on Keats and contemporary American poetry. He is also co-editing, with Deidre Lynch, the Romantic Period volume of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, 11th edition. Recent articles include essays on Keats and recent American poetry, on women poets and the city, and on teaching Jane Austen with the Gothic. His article "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Energies of Fandom" was reprinted in a collection of literary criticism on EBB from Bloom's Literary Criticism. He received his PhD from Harvard in 2003.

Current Research

Professor Eisner’s current projects include books on Keats and contemporary American poetry, and on Romantic-era cultures of reading.

Selected Publications

“[Byron's] Posthumous Reception and Reinvention to 1900.” Byron in Context. Ed. Clara Tuite. Cambridge University Press, 2020. 289-296.

"Landon's Local Attachments: Urban Mobility, Literary Memory, and the Professional Woman Writer." Studies in Romanticism 58:1 (Spring 2019) 27-50.

"Versions of Negative Capability in Modern American Poetry and Criticism." Keats's Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives. Ed. Brian Rejack and Michael Theune. Liverpool University Press, 2019. 154-170.

“Drag Keats: Mark Doty’s ‘Cockney Poetics’.” European Romantic Review 28:3 (2017) 387-393.

“Reading for the Moment.” “We, Reading, Now” Colloquium, eds. Julie Orlemanski and Dalglish Chew. Arcade: Literature, Humanities, & The World. October 2016.

"Jane Austen and the Gothic." Teaching Jane Austen. Ed. Devoney Looser and Emily C. Friedman. Romantic Circles. April 2015.

"Disaster Poetics: Keats and Contemporary Poetry." Wordsworth Circle 44:2-3 (2013) 153-58.

Ed. and intro. Romantic Fandom. Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2011).

Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

"Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Energies of Fandom." Victorian Review 33:2 (2007): 85-102. Rpt. in Harold Bloom, ed. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Bloom's Modern Critical Views). New York: Chelsea House, 2015.

Courses Taught

ENGH 308: Persons and Things

ENGH 334: British Romantic Poetry

ENGH 335: Victorian Sexualities

ENGH 400: Romantic Lives

ENGH 432/642: Keats and Contemporary Poetry

ENGH 640: British Romanticism

ENGH 360: Special Topics: Jane Austen and the Gothic

ENGH 363: Literature of the Uncanny