Scholarly Editing and the Interpretation of Wordsworth and Landor: The Hinge of Critique

In this dissertation, I apply a model of historical scholarship to three “problem sets” from the scholarship on British Romanticism. The problem sets, though distinct, stem from an interest in the mechanism of academic possession: how does scholarly discourse reproduce itself? Specifically, how has scholarly discourse about the British Romantic period reproduced itself between the end of the nineteenth century, when scholars began to organize English literature as a field of academic study, and 2015? By recovering the logics that decide which system of classification should organize a collection of poems, which text of a beloved poem editors should prioritize, and whether and how critics should read writers on the margins of romantic discourse, I hope to enjoin readers to remake, through new acts of self-reflection, the field we share.