Rachael Tarrant

This project seeks to uncover, contextualise and interpret formerly under-explored Romantic-period student marginalia contained in Scottish university library editions of Romantic-period imaginative literature. Pilot research demonstrates that these student inscriptions reveal compelling negotiations with shifting models of literary discourse during a pivotal period of print-cultural proliferation and literary politicisation. This project proposes to build a large-scale dataset of marginalia and texts, focusing particularly on the University of Glasgow’s substantial holdings, to systematically examine such book use. Further archival records, including lecture synopses, student notebooks and exam scripts on the University of Glasgow’s precursor course to English Literature, ‘Belles Lettres and Logic’, will be analysed to enrich the thesis’ interpretation of marginalia. The project will additionally employ digital technology to transcribe and add data from the University of Glasgow’s surviving Romantic-period student borrowing registers to Katie Halsey et. al’s ‘Books and Borrowing: 1750-1830’ database, aiding the thesis’ search for popular books, as well as generating searchable data on Romantic-period Glaswegian students’ reading trends. This project will show how university editions of Romantic-period imaginative literature were adopted and transformed by students into spaces which beckoned fierce and combative scrawled interventions into wider literary discourse. It will enrich the reconstruction of our literary past by attending to Romantic-period Scottish students’ negotiations of field-defining constructions of literature.