K-SAA Distinguished Scholar: An Interview with Beth Lau

The K-SAA was delighted to name Beth Lau as one of our Distinguished Scholars at MLA in Chicago earlier this month, and we were equally pleased to have the chance to ask her a few questions about the past, present and future of her relationship with Romanticism and our scholarly community. Her generous and compelling responses are below - enjoy!

Thank you for speaking with the K-SAA blog, and congratulations on the Distinguished Scholar award! Have you attended K-SAA dinners in the past?  Do you have a favorite memory?

Thankyou. I was so honored to receive the Distinguished Scholar Award this year.

Ihave attended many K-SAA award dinners in the past.  They are always uplifting occasions that makeeveryone feel part of a community and a noble tradition of Romanticscholarship. 

Probably my fondest memory of a K-SAA dinner was the first one that I attended in 1986, when I delivered the encomium for Jack Stillinger, who was my dissertation director.  As I sat at the head table with Jack, he pointed out notable people to me: there is Aileen Ward, I remember him saying, and there is Carl Woodring.  I met Betty Bennet, Don Reiman, Stuart Sperry, Bob Ryan, and other luminaries who previously had only been names attached to important books for me.  After the banquet I went for a drink with Charlie Robinson and Christine Gallant.  I felt as if I was taking first steps toward gaining entrée into the enchanted circle of Romantics scholars.

What attracted you to Romanticism initially, or inspired some of your past work?

I think I was hard-wired to become a Romanticist, because from my first acquaintance with the Romantic poets and prose writers I was drawn to their works.  On my seventeenth birthday I memorized “Ode to the West Wind,” and I used to leap about the field near my house in southern Indiana reciting, “Be thou Spirit fierce, / My spirit!  Be thou me, impetuous one!”  A Romantic period class I took as a junior in college extended my familiarity with and interest in writers from this era.  The experience that clinched my desire to become a professor in this field, however, was a seminar on Keats taught by Jack Stillinger that I enrolled in my second semester as a graduate student.  For the first time I encountered someone who embodied for me a life of scholarship and accomplishment that crystalized my own aspirations.  Jack’s emphasis on projects that involve archival research and factual information offered a model of literary study grounded in accuracy and proof that appealed to an empirical bent in my nature, and I also admired the lucidity and logic of his writing. My own achievements fall far short of Jack’s, but his teaching and example have continued to guide and inspire me throughout my career.

What’s most exciting to you right now in the field?

Oneof the most promising new areas of research to me is the field ofcognitive-evolutionary or biocultural approaches to literature.  Many important discoveries are being made incognitive neuroscience, psychology, and related fields that have excitingimplications for literary study, helping to illuminate both individual worksand the question of why humans enjoy creating and reading stories and poems. Ata time when STEM education is promoted and the humanities disparaged, anapproach that unites science and literature demonstrates that these fieldsenrich one another and should not be seen as opposing fields of knowledge.

Anothertopic that interests me is the study of connections and shared conventionsbetween novels and poetry in the Romantic period. As critics such as CliffordSiskin and Gabrielle Starr have argued, these genres were shaped by the samehistorical developments and responded in similar ways.  As with the subject I mentioned in theprevious paragraph, this one involves exploring overlap and common ground amongdifferent disciplines or traditions, so I guess that is an approach thatappeals to me.

A longstanding and ongoing interest of mine is the study of writers’ reading of and intertextual dialogue with other writers.

What are you working on currently?

With Greg Kucich and Daniel Johnson, I am creating a digital edition of Keats’s annotated copy of Paradise Lost.  It should be ready to launch soon (update: the digital edition has now been launched). We hope to expand the website by adding other books containing Keats’s marginalia, such as his folio copy of Shakespeare’s plays and his copy of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.  Last summer, Greg, Dan, and I organized a conference in London called “Keats’s Reading / Reading Keats,” devoted to exploring Keats’s responses to other poets and prose writers and later writers’ creative engagements with Keats poetry.  We are now compiling a volume of essays from the conference.  My own essay for this project is on “Keats as a Reader of Novels.”

Anything else you would like to share?

Ihope current and future generations will continue to enjoy and studyRomantic-era writers.  At present, theredoes not appear to be any danger of interest in the field dying out!

Beth Lau is Professor of English Emerita at California State University, Long Beach. She is the author of Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets (1991) and Keats’s Paradise Lost (1998), as well as numerous articles on various Romantic writers. She also edited Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind (2017), Fellow Romantics: Male and Female British Writers, 1790-1835 (2009), the New Riverside edition of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (2002), and co-edited (with Diane Hoeveler) Approaches to Teaching Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1993).