Anastasia Eccles

Ph.D., Stanford University, 2018

B.A., Yale University, 2007

I work on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, with particular interests in theories of reading, the novel, and the long history of formalism. My book project examines modes of reading cultivated by a group of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels and tales, asking what aesthetic experiences like being held in suspense, feeling complicit, or longing for a different plot have to do with living in a political collective. I have also written on the reception of Laurence Sterne in Russia, and I am working on a co-authored manuscript on suspense and the digital humanities with members of the Stanford Literary Lab. This year I am teaching courses in the history of poetry, narrative suspense, and Jane Austen and Walter Scott.

PUBLICATION:

“Formalism and Sentimentalism: Viktor Shklovsky and Laurence Sterne,” New Literary History 47.4 (2016)

COURSES:

Suspense and Narrative; Jane Austen and Walter Scott: History and Manners in the Romantic Novel; Readings in English Poetry II