Education in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Exclusion as Innovation

Cordner traces a tradition of literary resistance to dominant pedagogies in nineteenth-century Britain, recovering an overlooked chapter in the history of thought about education. Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing used their position as outsiders excluded from Oxford and Cambridge by gender or class to argue for the value of learning outside of schools. Their work points to a broader cultural movement that embraced the freedom of learning on ones own.