British Romanticism and the Literature of Human Interest explores the importance to Romantic literature of a concept of human interest. It examines a range of literary experiments to engage readers through subjects and styles that were at once "interesting" and that, in principle, were in their "interest." These experiments put in question relationships between poetry and prose; lyric and narrative; and literature and popular media. The book places literary works by a range of nineteenth-century writers including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Matthew Arnold into dialogue with a variety of non-literary and paraliterary forms ranging from newspapers to footnotes. The book investigates the generic structures of Romantic literature and the negotiation of the status of literature in the period in relation to a new media landscape. It explores the self-theorization of Romantic literature and argues for its value to contemporary literary criticism.
Industry Reviews
Important and novel ... British Romanticism and the Literature of Human Interest shows convincingly that the topic of human interest, while it frequently comprises the content and orientation of a given text, more often animates its paratextual apparatus (title, preface, footnotes, marginal comments, letters written during composition of the text). That is, the question of human interest … is for Romantic writers primarily a formal matter played out in paratextual discussions of how best to depict a “human” envisioned as strengthening our humanity.
