Associate Professor Eric Parisot

I am an Associate Professor in English interested in the literature and culture of the British long eighteenth century (including Romanticism), the Gothic, literary responses to death, and the history of emotions.

My first book, Graveyard Poetry: Religion, Aesthetics and the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Poetic Condition (Ashgate, 2013), is the first long study of this devotional poetic mode, one that highlights how its obsessive preoccupation with death and salvation makes visible its importance as an articulation or negotiation between contemporary religious concerns and emerging aesthetics of poetic practice. Further research examining the mode’s proto-Gothic sensibilities has culminated in a forthcoming collection of essay (co-edited with David McAllister and Xavier Aldana Reyes) on Graveyard Gothic (Manchester UP), a transhistorical and multicultural volume defining a new area of Gothic studies.

Also forthcoming is a monograph titled Jane Austen and Vampires: Love, Sex and Immortality in the New Millennium (Palgrave). This book examines the unlikely literary convergence of Jane Austen and vampires in fanfic mashups since Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, arguing that such amateur writings reveal a great deal about the changing perceptions of what Austen and vampires signify in the twenty-first century, as well as contemporary romantic ideals.

Currently, I’m working towards a monograph on representations of suicide in print and on stage in the British eighteenth century, with a view to highlighting their public, affective impact on shifting understandings of suicide and what it means to the living communities.