Ann Wierda Rowland

In all my work, I am interested in the social construction, material world, and cultural work of literature: how literary texts are framed, read, and given value, as well as how they act on and produce other literary and cultural forms. The major focus of my early research and scholarship was on childhood and Romantic literary culture. My first book, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture, analyzed how new ideas of childhood (theories of infancy and development, notions of childhood language and memory) enabled new conceptions of history and literary culture, at the same time that a new sense of national literature (one that included popular, trivial and native literary forms) brought the child and childhood into the arena of cultural production and reproduction. More recently, my work has turned to the repertoires of author love in nineteenth-century Anglo-American literary culture, focusing on a set of Boston readers who were devoted to the poet, John Keats. My forthcoming book, Keats Love: Reading John Keats in America, traces a network of attachments, artifacts, relationships, and reading repertoires – all pursued under the name of “Keats love” – through nineteenth and early twentieth-century Boston literary culture and the lives of particular readers in order to see what “Keats” made possible for them and what they, in turn, made possible for “Keats.”

Areas of research:

19th century transatlantic Anglo-American literature and literary culture, British Romanticism, phenomenological and cognitive accounts of reading, book history and the history of reading, children and the idea of the child in literary culture