about
My name is Emily and I’m a Ph.D. student of English literature. I work on British literature from roughly 1740-1850. I am interested, to put it broadly, in the relationship between aesthetics, perception, and epistemology, especially as these things pertain to portrayals of landscapes and nature in literature. The main authors I work on are John Clare, Jane Austen, and William Wordsworth, in addition to all the other standard Romantic stuff, although I also read a lot of obscure things like agricultural reports from the 1790s, landscape gardening tracts, natural history writing, and maps.
Right now I’m reading for my oral exams, and this blog consists of my notes about the works on my exam lists. Aside from being a convenient (non-)organizational tool and database, I thought a Tumblr would be a good place for these, since having the notes in a public place might shame me into keeping up with them!
These notes are not formal or polished in any way. They no doubt contain a lot of sentence fragments and typos, as well as shorthand for things that don’t make sense to anyone else but me. They are aids to memory rather than complete thoughts.
I am not reading books in any particular order. I’m starting off with what I’m more curious about (which seems to be stuff from the 18th century, mostly) and working my way towards the more familiar. Titles with asterisks by them are finished.
The Task is the title of William Cowper’s 1785 blank verse demi-epic poem, and I thought it was also an appropriate title for this blog.
