Romanticism and the everyday

Abstract

This essay surveys recent scholarship in the study of Romanticism that takes an interest in the concept of the everyday. Why does the everyday have pull and import for scholars of British literature and culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century? This essay argues that the power of the everyday as a concept extends far beyond its expected meaning or its simple association with day-to-day or conventional life. First, this essay shows that in Romantic scholarship the everyday, instead, often indicates a mode of understanding, a framework for reading the past and present—what I call the everyday as historiographic method. Second, this essay shows that in strains of literary criticism that take the adjacent concept of the “ordinary” as a persistent concern, the everyday is not a method but an aspiration or an achievement. This lineage of thinking about the everyday, I argue, in the field inspired by the writings of the later Wittgenstein loosely described as “ordinary language philosophy” remains largely peripheral in the field of literary studies today. This essay thus aims to highlight new contributions in Romantic scholarship at the crossroads of literary and philosophical thinking.