What I knew most about from Stanford was the Romantics: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley (Percy and Mary), Byron, and the like. But I also really liked the history of the English language. So how could I combine these things? Well, the nineteenth century is when people got interested in the history of the English language. And Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere with weird old spelling. I'll study people who wrote in old-looking language!
That's the application I sent two years running, and here I am. Now where the hell do I start? Well, how about a picture for wading through all this. You can tell I was playing with the camera's selective color setting.
I started with books and articles that looked like they might have background info on the huge medievalist trend in the nineteenth century. Then I started chasing footnotes. I found a couple really interesting articles that pulled in something I was interested in back during my history of the language class.
Did you know that Tennyson was part of the "Apostles," a secret-ish undergrad society at Trinity College, Cambridge? And that his colleagues in the club (and friends for much longer) were key in bringing over the new German philology with new ways of tracing languages back to earlier ones? Do you care? ;) Anyway, it's fascinating (to me) how worked up some people were about words "losing meaning" because they didn't mean precisely one and only one thing.
So that's what I've been poking around with so far. In about 10 hours I'll meet with my supervisor and find out if I'll be changing directions entirely. One more picture:
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