McGill David Hume Research Grant 2019 Srdjan Cvjeticanin, University of Michigan I came across the existence of this collection while researching the relationship between David Hume and British Romanticism. Given my interest in the political theories inherent to romantic- era literature, I was delighted to discover that the library’s holdings include not only a vast collection of scholarship on Hume, but also an impressive Napoleon Collection and a collection of English literature, the later filled with the works of lesser known romantic-era writers, and the former with thousands of political documents directed at the British public in the first decades of the 19th century. The opportunity to come to McGill and spend four weeks at the Rare Books Library, with the generous support of the David Hume Research Grant, was unbelievable. My immediate interest during my stay was a thorough understanding of Hume’s philosophy, for understanding how it may have influenced British romantic-era writers, specifically how it, as part of the British intellectual heritage, shaped their reactions to and conceptualizations of the French Revolution and modernity. The more specific focus was on Hume’s theory of human understanding and the mind more generally, as well as his thought on history, religion, politics, and feeling as a social and historical phenomenon. Given the speculative nature of my objective, the extent of the collection’s scholarship on Hume, stretching from the 18th century to the present, was invaluable. Aside from this primary interest, my time was also devoted to researching other materials that relate to my dissertation held by the Rare Books Library. My dissertation reads a selection of British and American romantic-era literature as embodiments of philosophical positions responsive to their socio-political contexts. The study is focused on literary works that can be understood as critiques of the various reformist and revolutionary ideologies, which were themselves opposed to conservative and reactionary ideologies, or works categorized as ironic or socio-politically ambiguous, under the wager that often it is the apparently alienating, stultifying, oppressive, burdensome, and conservative elements of a doctrine that open up and make possible its radical ideas. Given this subject of study, the Rare Books Library’s extensive collection of the Anti-Jacobin Review was of great interest, as was the collection of political documents contained in the Napoleon Collection. The two offered extensive, and for my purposes necessary, depictions of the conservative response to the socio-political turbulence in Britain during the romantic era. Taken together with the canonized works of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and others, not to mention the pamphlets and other writings of the many revolutionary and reformist political organizations of the period, these materials allowed me to position the socio-politically ambiguous works that are the objects of my study, most notably Wordsworth, Byron, and Carlyle. The final object of my research were the works of “minor” romantic-era writers contained in the Rare Books Library’s English literature collection, in particular those of Thomas Chatterton and Hannah More. Neither Chatterton nor More are a primary focus in my dissertation. Indeed, my interest in them, no different than in other “minor” writers, hinges on the assumption of Walter Benjamin’s methodology in his seminal study of the German trauespiele, namely that the works of lesser authors precisely because of their lack of singular creative genius make the specific disposition of the genre more evident, and, consequently, the tension or confrontation between their aesthetic and intellectual heritage and their socio-politically turbulent moment clearer, more marked. Since I focus on aesthetic forms—specifically the formal innovations and the re-purposing of established genres by romantic-era writers—as articulations of philosophical dispositions, or theoretical responses to socio-political contexts, these works provide a further framework for reading the socio-politically ambiguous or ironic works of writers such as Wordsworth, Byron, and Carlyle. In short, the holdings of the Rare Books Library, not to mention the extremely knowledgeable, helpful, and kind librarians and staff, provided me with a wonderful opportunity to access materials that ranged across a significant portion of my dissertation. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to all of the staff and benefactors of McGill University’s Rare Books and Special Collections Library.