About

This project constructs an original conceptual framework for the study of silence in British poetry of the Romantic period. It is the first extended study that focuses on the use of thematic, structural, stylistic, and textual silence in the works of both canonical and non-canonical British Romantic poets. This study proposes that a sustained investigation of the employment of silence in the social, political, and scientific environments of Britain from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century will yield a novel understanding of the discourse and rhetoric of silence in British Romantic poetry. Through a combination of historical, computational, and humanistic approaches, my study will develop a distinctive philosophical articulation of ‘silence’ that conceptually integrates literature, social sciences, and biomedical sciences to provide new historical and interdisciplinary perspectives for the study of British Romanticism.

This project is partly funded by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh), KU Leuven [Ref.: PDM/20/047], and Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen.