Rohan Harrison
Rohan Harrison
PhD candidate in English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne
Rohan specialises in literary genre theory and the gothic fictions of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Britain, considered as material practices involving a number of stakeholders in the changing print economy following the consumer revolution. His current research explores the role of the Minerva Press in the emergence of the gothic as a genre, considering its publishing output and marketing practices as attempts to cultivate a reliable readership by supplying readers with a particular sort of imaginary world. This use of genre serves as an important precursor to the marriage of marketing and textual immersion that would come to characterise the genre fictions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Rohan’s focus on the romantic nostalgia of gothic worlds, put to work in the consumer economy through its ability to generate immersive virtual environments, connects his work to several ERCC themes, including Critique, Creativity, Comparison and Actual, Mixed and Virtual Realities.