Mai-Lin Cheng's British Romanticism and the Literature of Human Interest

Abstract

"In our own age of clickbait, every reader knows a thing or two about the magnetism of the human interest story and its formulaism" (15). Affirming the prominence of the human interest story in today's social media and press, Cheng's book retraces its earlier, complex manifestations and considers "the Romantic engagement with the problem of human interest through formal experiments in lyric and narrative" (2). Her definition of Romantic "human interest" is contextual, "more topos than concept" (5), as she writes in the introductory first chapter, which also "outlines the Romantic idea of human interest and its resonance in modern media culture" (2). Chapters two, three, and four treat the Wordsworths (and De Quincey), the Shelleys, and Byron respectively, while the final chapter, "Romantic Ends," considers the idea and role of "anecdote" through Matthew Arnold's essay "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (2).