A new book by CSWS faculty affiliate Mai-Lin Cheng “explores the importance to Romantic literature of a concept of human interest.” British Romanticism and the Literature of Human Interest was published in December 2017 by Bucknell University Press and co-published by Rowman & Littlefield. It is part of Bucknell’s Series in Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850.
Mai-Lin Cheng is an assistant professor of literature in the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon.
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“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.”
— Julie A. Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara
