The Discovery of Character: Literature and Science ca. 1800

The lecture will explore two great literary experiments at the turn of the 19th century—William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent—to demonstrate two contrasting approaches to the question of what it means to discover a character. Each work involves different assumptions about the relationship between literature and science.

Speaker bio

Professor James Chandler is William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of English Literature at the University of Chicago. He specializes in 18th Century British Literature, Irish Literature, Romanticism Studies, Cinema Studies, and the History of Literary Criticism. His research and teaching interests include the Romantic movement, the study of lyric poetry, the history of the novel, history and criticism, the Scottish Enlightenment, modern Irish literature and culture, the sentimental mode, cinema studies, and the history of humanities disciplines. Professor Chandler is the author of Wordsworth’s Second Nature (1984), England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (1998), An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema 2013) and Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts (2022). He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Romantic Poetry (2008) and The New Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (2008). From 2001 to 2018 he served as Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities at Chicago. where he led a series of pathbreaking projects on literary history, digital humanities, and environmental humanities.