Dr. Anastasia Eccles

Biography

Anastasia Eccles is an Assistant Professor of English at Yale University, specializing in eighteenth-century Romantic literature. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2018 and a B.A. from Yale University in 2007. Her research focuses on theories of reading, the novel, and the long history of formalism. She has a forthcoming book titled 'Perverse Attachments: Reading Fiction 1800' with the University of Chicago Press, which theorizes the condition she terms 'perverse attachment,' defined as a strong desire to act but without control. Eccles identifies the form of frustrated agency as a crucial aspect of the experience of reading fiction, particularly under the sentimentalism regime that shaped the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which she argues is a key feature of emergent mass politics. Her publications include works on the witness-protagonist in literature, as well as critiques of William Godwin's 'Caleb Williams' and the formalism of Viktor Shklovsky and Laurence Sterne. In addition to her research, she teaches several undergraduate and graduate courses, including 'Novel Feelings' and 'Sentimentalism Critics.'

Research Interests

Courses