Critical reading
Romantic and Victorian Poetry Module - listed below are resources that can be accessed electronically either via our Library or other open access forums. You may wish to make selective use of them as you prepare your exam substitute task. Your module tutors Emma Francis and Stacey McDowell are also available via email to suggest targeted recommendations for your particular project.
This document provides a list of online resources that may help you to explore your interest in the period and/or be of use when it comes to researching your essays. It’s necessarily quite a catch-all list, so feel free to pick and choose. Most books indicated are sourced to Warwick Library’s e-holdings. A free, global resource has been released by some good citizens based in San Francisco called the Emergency National Library. It has a rich selection of critical and primary texts relevant to the module and can be searched by title, author or key word. All you need to get your virtual library card is to enter your email address and pick a password. Put ‘Internet Archive’ or ‘archive.org’ into a search engine and it will come up.
The William Blake Archive
A wonderful collection of digitized illuminated manuscripts, prints, drawings and paintings
For Better for Verse
A ‘fun game’ that lets you scan poems and then check your answers (but don’t worry if you get them wrong – the site has some very fixed views on prosody. I often find my scansion of a given poem differs from the ‘correct’ version on the site – it’s a matter of interpretation not an exact science)
https://prosody.lib.virginia.edu/
Romantic-Era Songs
If you fancy a Romantic-era singalong to entertain yourselves with during lockdown, this site features theatre and popular songs, catches, airs, and art songs of the Romantic period, as well as some later settings of lyrics and poems of Romantic poets
https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/douglass/music/index.html
Women in the Literary Marketplace
An online selection of works by nineteenth-century women writers as well as some contextual information about the literary marketplace
https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/womenLit/intro.htm
Online Poetry Readings of Wordsworth and Tennyson
Tennyson
https://sms.cam.ac.uk/collection/687746
Wordsworth
https://sms.cam.ac.uk/collection/1170406
The Victorian Web
Some brief introductory essays and archive material related to Victorian literature, culture, gender, politics
NeuRon Romanticism on the Net
A database containing lists of numerous online resources related to the study of Romanticism (worth a browse but be aware that only some, not all, are freely accessible and you could easily lose yourself down a rabbit hole of the more obscure online collections)
https://ronjournal.org/neuron/
Critical Reading
You can search for journal articles on
Proquest https://search.proquest.com/?accountid=14888
Jstor https://www.jstor.org/
Project Muse https://muse.jhu.edu/account/authenticate
Books available online via Warwick University Library:
General Topics
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (1993)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.4324/9781315775883
Barbara Barrow, Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry
Political Dialects (2019)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.4324/9780429200922
Matthew Bevis, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (2013)
Joseph Bristow, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (2002)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1017/CCOL0521641152
Linda K. Hughes, ed., The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (2010)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1017/9781316856543
Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity (1980)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1515/9781400855445
Iain McCalman, ed., An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (1999)
http://encore.lib.warwick.ac.uk/iii/encore/record/C__Rb2716781
Anne McCarthy, Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry (2019)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.3138/9781487516284
Orianne Smith, Romantic Women Writers, Revolution and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters 1786-1826 (2013)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1017/CBO9781139208840
Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986)
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/reader.action?docID=4702200
Single-Author Studies
William McCarthy and Olivia Murphy, eds., Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives (2014)
http://encore.lib.warwick.ac.uk/iii/encore/record/C__Rb3430094
Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen, eds., Mary Wollstonecraft in Context (2020)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1017/9781108261067
Saree Makdisi, Reading William Blake (2015)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1017/CBO9781139032476
Ewan Jones, Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (2014)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1017/CBO9781107705913
Emma Mason, The Cambridge Introduction to Wordsworth (2010)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1017/CBO9780511781940
Lucy Newlyn, William and Dorothy Wordsworth: 'All in Each Other' (2013)
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=1581033
Michael O’Neill, ed. John Keats in Context (2017)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1017/9781107707474
Simon Kövesi and Scott McEathron, eds., New Essays on John Clare (2015)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1017/CBO9781139381246
Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk, eds., Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (2001)
https://0-link-springer-com.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/book/10.1057%2F9780230389564
Seamus Perry, Alfred Tennyson (2019)
David A. Kent, ed., The Achievement of Christina Rossetti (1989)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.7591/9781501745942
Maria R. Lichtmann, The Contemplative Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1989)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1515/9781400859986
Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman, eds., Amy Levy: Critical Essays (2010)
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=1743709
Marion Thain, 'Michael Field': Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle (2007)
https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1017/CBO9780511484933
Kerry Powell and Peter Raby, eds., Oscar Wilde in Context (2013) https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=1578895
Essays published in the period - This is the list of contextual and introductory resources we suggested your consult at the start of and during the module. Most of them will be easily available online. If you have them with you your Norton Anthologies also contain salient extracts from a rich array of contemporaneous prose works dealing with aesthetics, poetics, politics, culture and society - have a look through them.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
William Wordsworth, 'Preface', to the Lyrical Ballads (1802)
S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817)
John Keats, letter to George and Tom Keats, December 21, 1817; letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, May 3, 1818; letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818
P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821)
Thomas Carlyle, 'Signs of the Times' (1829)
William Johnson Fox, 'Tennyson: Poems, Chiefly Lyrical 1830'
John Stuart Mill, 'What is Poetry?' (1833)
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1830-33)
Arthur Hallam, ‘On Some Characteristics of Modern Poetry’ (1831)
Robert Buchanan, 'The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr D. G. Rossetti' (1871)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 'The Stealthy School of Criticism' (1871)
Coventry Patmore, 'Prefatory Study on English Metrical Law' (1878)
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'Author's Preface' (1918)
Secondary criticism
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic theory and the Critical Tradition (1958)
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (1993)
Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (1961)
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1982)
Joseph Bristow, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (2002)
Cynthia Chase, ed., Romanticism (1993)
Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986)
Richard Cronin et al, ed., A Companion to Victorian Poetry (2002)
Aidan Day, Romanticism (1995)
Paula Feldman and Theresa Kelley, ed., Romantic Women Writers (1995)
Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity (1980)
Linda K. Hughes, The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (2010)
Emma Mason and Jonathan Herapath, Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Criticisms and Debates (Routledge: 2016)
Emma Mason, The Cambridge Introduction to Wordsworth (2010)
Iain McCalman, ed., An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (1999)
Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (1993)
Marlon B. Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry (1989)
Sharon Ruston, Romanticism (2007)
Jason Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (2010)
Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (1986)
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958)