ABSTRACT
Scholarship in the literature and culture of British Romanticism has long reflected the curricular structure of the colleges and universities in which that literature and culture is taught and studied. The shrink-wrapped approach has historically hampered the very sort of creative teaching and border-crossing scholarship that field needs more than ever before in these days when so many of are heavily invested in revising and remapping the Romantic literary and cultural landscape. Nevertheless, in Romantic poetry and fiction, as in Romantic drama, and non-fictional discursive prose, the conventional academy-bound, curriculum-driven, single-genre pedagogical model remains the dominant paradigm in Romantic studies. Moreover, that traditional canon-bound view of Romanticism largely excluded alternative mappings of Romanticism and its writing community that emphasized matters of gender, class, economics, socio-political program, or aesthetics. The sort of collective enterprise, which is itself inherently Romantic in its dialogical, community orientation, offers extraordinary new opportunities for discovering resonances among diverse lives, texts, and other artifacts of British Romanticism.
