English

Christopher R. Miller is the author of The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, 2006), a study of the evening poem from Virgil to T.S. Eliot, with a focus on the ways that lyric poetry represents time and temporal process. He has recently completed a new book entitled Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected in the Long Eighteenth Century.  It investigates the role of surprise as narrative event, allegorical crux, cognitive experience, and aesthetic category in the poetry, novels and literary criticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His main field is British Romanticism, but his broader teaching and research interests are in lyric poetry and lyric theory, as well as eighteenth-century fiction. He has taught courses in Romantic poetry, lyric theory, and eighteenth-century fiction; and he is a past recipient of Yale's Sarai Ribicoff prize for teaching and the Heyman Prize for first book by a Yale junior faculty member in the humanities.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--“Happily Ever After? The Necessity of Fairytale in Queen Mab” (in The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. Weinberg and Webb, 2009)

--"Fine Suddenness: Keats’s Sense of a Beginning” (in Something Understood, ed. Burt and Halperin, 2009)

--"Wordsworth’s Anatomies of Surprise,” Studies in Romanticism (2007).

--The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, 2006).

--"Jane Austen’s Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise,” Narrative (2005).

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Major English Poets, The Historical Novel.