Mai-Lin Li Cheng
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 364
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"Marginal Stories" is a study of the ethics and epistemology of literary form in British Romanticism. It examines the ways in which key figures in the Romantic movement conceptualized stories of "human interest" and argues for the centrality of the problem of human interest in the formal and the philosophical debates of this period. I am concerned especially with the ways in which attempts to construe the relation between aesthetic form and so-called "human interest" generate critical supplements to Romantic texts; the phrase appears, for example, in Coleridge's commentary on the Lyrical Ballads , Mary Shelley's annotations to Percy Shelley's poems, and Byron's description of his own work. Through readings of these and other texts, I show that the Romantic debates on human interest---whether in the Orientalisms of Percy Shelley, Thomas Moore, and Lord Byron, or the rural fables of Dorothy and William Wordsworth, which depicted the "rustic" in the English countryside---telegraphed an anxiety about the waning relevance of poetry as the novel was beginning to emerge as the century's dominant genre. I show further that, in many instances, arguments over how to make lyric and narrative forms relevant to a changing audience were explicitly or implicitly tied to questions of race and representation through a discourse that often mistook the white European for the universal human. My title, "Marginal Stories," refers then not just to the overlooked "story" of human interest, but to the ways in which debates over form and interest circulated through the margins of both nineteenth-century literature and culture. The aim of "Marginal Stories" is to employ contemporary theory to re-ignite the internal critical energies of the Romantic moment and, above all, to demonstrate that the formal polemics around lyric and narrative during the Romantic period were always also arguments about how to think the form of the human.