Romantic scenes of reading.

This dissertation examines the practice and representation of reading during the Romantic Era in Britain using an original, innovative methodology. In addition to offering a new interpretive lens for understanding the work of Romantic writers, I show how Romantic scenes of reading are markedly performative endeavors that require readers to enact diverse and dynamic identities. The methodological approach that I have constructed takes into account a series of concentric circles, or frames in which to place scenes of reading, beginning with texts' thematic or phenomenological accounts of reading and working out to the material history of books and social practices of reading. The chapters of the dissertation focus on writers whose works mark particularly vexing relations between these frames. In a discussion of the British Elocutionary Movement and Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, I argue that the kind of reading demanded by the sonnets is a construction of the conventions of public performance described in texts on elocution from the period. The next chapter shows how cheap and widely available editions of English poetry contributed to bibliomania, arguing that this phenomenon should shape our understanding of essays by William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. In the following chapter, I compare Mary Shelley's reading practices to that of her heroines in Lodore and Valperga, showing how a pedagogy of reading can be both liberating and constraining. Lastly, I examine the writing style of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and the reading practices it engenders in order to interpret James Hogg's novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.Ph.D.English literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126692/2/3276161.pd