British Literature of the Romantic Era

Students preparing to take the comprehensive examination in Romantic Literature (c.1780-1830) should be familiar not only with the breadth of primary texts listed below but also with the major interpretive, critical, and historical issues concerning these texts.  See the bibliography below for suggested readings and avenues for further research.  For listings below that do not identify specific texts, consult with your advisor concerning the appropriate and relevant critical editions.

POETRY

• Charlotte Smith, selections from Elegiac Sonnets (including I, V, XXII, XXXII, XLIV, LXX)
• Robert Burns, “John Barleycorn. A Ballad”, “To a Mouse”, “A Red Red Rose”, “Auld Lang Syne”, “The Fornicator. A New Song”, “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye”
• William Blake, All Religions are One, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Auguries of Innocence”, “The Mental Traveller”, “The Crystal Cabinet”, The Book of Thel; Visions of the Daughters of Albion or First Book of Urizen; selections from Milton or Jerusalem  
• Mary Robinson, “Canzonet”, “Modern Female Fashions”, “Modern Male Fashions”, “The Camp”, “January, 1795”, Sappho and Phaon
• Anna Letitia Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven;  “Rights of Woman”
• William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (both 1798 and 1800 eds., with special attention to “Tintern Abbey”, “Michael”, and the ‘Lucy poems’); “The Ruined Cottage” (from Excursion, Bk I), “Prospectus to the Excursion”, “Nutting”, “My Heart Leaps up When I Behold”, “Ode [Intimations]”, “The Solitary Reaper”, “Elegiac Stanzas”, “The Old Cumberland Beggar”, “Resolution and Independence”, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, “It is a Beauteous Evening”, “The World is Too Much With Us”, The Prelude (1805 version)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (both 1798 [Lyrical Ballads] and 1817 versions), “Nightingale” [also from Lyrical Ballads], “Frost at Midnight”, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, “Dejection: An Ode”, “Christabel”, “Kubla Khan”, “The Eolian Harp”, “To a Gentleman [William Wordsworth]”, “Ne Plus Ultra”
• George Gordon, Lord Byron, “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers”, “When We Two Parted”, “Fare Thee Well”, “To the Po”, “She Walks in Beauty”, “Darkness”, “Prometheus”, Manfred or Cain, Lara or The Giaour, “On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year”, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; (selections from Cantos I-IV), Don Juan (Dedication, Canto I and selections from II-V and XI)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alastor, “To Wordsworth”, “Mont Blanc”, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, “Ozymandias”, “Julian and Maddalo”, “Ode to the West Wind”, Prometheus Unbound, “To a Skylark”, Adonais, “Stanzas Written in Dejection”, “Lines: ‘When the Lamp Is Shattered’”, The Triumph of Life, “With a Guitar, to Jane”, “Sonnet: England in 1819”, “Song to the Men of England”
• John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer”, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”, “The Eve of St. Agnes”, “Incipit Altera Sonneta [“If by dull rhymes”]”, “Ode to Psyche”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode on Melancholy”, “To Autumn”, “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou are”, “When I have fears that I may cease to be”, “La Belle Dame sans Mercy”, “This living hand”
• John Clare, “I Am”, “First Love”, “Silent Love”; “Pastoral Poesy”, “Winter Fields”, “Cottage Fears”
• Felicia Hemans, “To the Poet Wordsworth”, “Casabianca”, “The Homes of England”, “The Image in Lava”, “The Lost Pleiad”, “The Hour of Death”
• Letitia Elizabeth Landon, “A Child Screening a Dove From a Hawk”, “Song: Lady, thy face is very beautiful”, “Lines of Life”, “Lines Written Under a Picture of a Girl Burning a Love Letter”, “Revenge”, “The Proud Ladye”, “Sappho’s Song”

DRAMA

In addition to Byron and P.B. Shelley’s works listed above:

• Elizabeth Inchbald, Lovers Vows
• Joanna Baillie, Count Basil or De Monfort and the “Introductory Discourse” to Plays on the Passions

Also recommended:

• Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother
• Robert Southey, Wat Tyler
• Byron, The Two Foscari.
• Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death’s Jest Book

FICTION

Gothic Novels

• Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
• Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho or The Italian
• Mathew G. Lewis, The Monk
• William Godwin, Caleb Williams
  • or Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya
• James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 version)

Other Prose Fiction of the Romantic Era

• Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary;   Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman
• Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent;  Belinda
• Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice;  Mansfield Park or Emma;  Persuasion
• Walter Scott, Waverley or Heart of Midlothian
• Sydney Owenson [Lady Morgan], The Wild Irish Girl 
  • or Frances Burney, The Wanderer

PROSE: ESSAYS & LETTERS

The Revolution Debate

• Helen Maria Williams, from Letters from France
• Thomas Paine, from The Rights of Man
• Edmund Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France
• Mary Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Man

Politics, Literary Criticism, and Life Writing

• Clara Reeve, from The Progress of Romance
• Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman 
• William Godwin, from Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
• Hannah More, selections from Cheap Repository Tracts (including “Patient Joe”, “The Riot”, “The Gin Shop”, and “The Sorrows of Yamba”)
• William Wordsworth, Prefaces from Lyrical Ballads (1800, 1802)
• Dorothy Wordsworth, from the Grasmere Journals
• Austen, selections from Letters, including: Oct. 27, 1798;  Dec.16, 1808;  April 25, 1811;  Jan. 29, 1813;  Feb. 4, 1813;  Sept. 9, 28, 1814;  Dec. 16, 1816;  Feb. 20-21, 1817;  March 23-25, 1817
• Keats, selections from Letters, including: Nov. 22, 1817; Dec. 21, 27, 1817; Feb. 3, 27, 1818; May 3, 1818; July 18, 1818; Oct. 27, 1818; Oct. 14-31, 1818; Feb. 14-May 3, 1819; July 25, 1819;  Aug. 16, 1820
• Coleridge, selections from Biographia Literaria,  including Chapters I, IV, XIII, XIV, XV, and XVII (with special attention to the Wordsworth dispute);  selections from Shakespearean criticism
• William Hazlitt, “My First Acquaintance with he Poets”,  “On Gusto”, selections from The Spirit of the Age (particularly the essays on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron)
• P.B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry; “Essay on Love”
• Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater

HELPFUL SECONDARY SOURCES

Anthologies

• Anne K. Mellor & Richard E. Matlak, British Literature, 1780-1830
• Jerome J. McGann, The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse
• Duncan Wu, Romanticism: An Anthology [2^nd ed.]
• Jonathan and Jessica Wordsworth, The New Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry
• David Perkins, English Romantic Writers
• Harold Bloom & Lionel Trilling, Romantic Poetry and Prose
• Paula R. Feldman, British Women Poets of the Romantic Era
• Duncan Wu, Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology
• Andrew Ashfield, Romantic Women Poets, Vol.I (1770-1838) and Vol.II (1788-1848)
• Paula R. Feldman & Daniel Robinson, A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival
• Jeffrey Cox & Michael Gamer, The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama

Criticism and Theory/General

• M.H. Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp
• ---, Natural Supernaturalism
• Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company
• ---, (ed.), Romanticism and Consciousness
• Stuart Curran (ed.), Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism
• ---, Poetic Form and British Romanticism
• Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism
• ---, Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism
• Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius
• Elizabeth Fay, A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism
• Northrop Frye, Romanticism Reconsidered
• Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic
• Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference
• Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings
• Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge
• Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology
• ---, The Poetics of Sensibility 
• --- [ed. James Soderholm], Byron & Romanticism
• Anne Mellor (ed.), Romanticism and Feminism
• ---, Mothers of the Nation
• Peter Manning, Reading Romantics
• Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality
• Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer
• Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789-1820)
• Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind
• Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire
• David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory
• Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse
• Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism

Specific/Topical

• Wollstonecraft: Claire Tomalin, Mary Poovey, Gary Kelly, Syndy Conger, Mitzi Myers, Vivien Jones, Tom Furniss, Claudia Johnson, G.J. Barker-Benfield, Janet Todd
• Blake:  Northrop Frye, David Erdman, S. Foster Damon, G.E. Bentley, Jr., Jean Hagstrum, W.J.T. Mitchell, Robert Gleckner, Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, Joseph Viscomi
• W. Wordsworth: Geoffrey Hartman, James Averill, Kenneth Johnston, Marjorie Levinson, Alan Liu, Peter Manning, Clifford Siskin, Stephen Gill, Duncan Wu, Nicholas Roe, David Collings
• D. Wordsworth:  Susan Levin, Margaret Homans, Kurt Heinzelman, Susan Wolfson, Beth Darlington, Meena Alexander, Anne Mellor
• Coleridge:  I.A. Richards, M.H. Abrams, H.J. Jackson, Thomas McFarland, Karen Swann, Jerome Christenson, Jerome McGann, Nicholas Roe, Paul Magnuson, Julie Carlson
• Byron:  Leslie Marchand, Louis Crompton, Cecil Lang, Jerome McGann, Peter Manning, Jerome Christenson, Andrew Elfenbein, Jonathan Gross
• P.B. Shelley:  G.M. Matthews, Earl Wasserman, Harold Bloom, Barbara Gelpi, William Keach, Stuart Curran, Donald Reiman, Neil Fraistat, Jerrold Hogle, Stephen Behrendt
• Mary Shelley:  Anne Mellor, Mary Poovey, Stuart Curran, Betty Bennett, William Veeder, Margaret Homans, Chris Baldick, Sonia Hofkosh, Lisa Vargo
• Keats:  W. J. Bate, Christopher Ricks, Stuart Sperry, Jack Stillinger, Jerome McGann, Jeffrey Cox, Karen Swann, Greg Kucich, Susan Wolfson
• Austen:  Claudia L. Johnson, Mary Poovey, Tony Tanner, Marilyn Butler, Jan Fergus, Marvin Mudrick, Margaret Doody, John Wiltshire, Susan Fraiman, Clifford Siskin, D.A. Miller
• Women poets: Isobel Armstrong, Stuart Curran (especially “The ‘I’ Altered” in Mellor & “Women Readers, Women Writers” in Curran), Paula Feldman, Angela Leighton, Tricia Lootens, Jerome McGann, collection by Harriet Kramer Linkin & Stephen Behrendt
• Gothic writing:  Ellen Moers, E.J. Clery, Eve Sedgwick, George Haggerty, Diane Hoeveler, Michael Gamer, Kate Ellis, Anne Williams, Fred Botting, Chris Baldick

  Specifically recommended are the Cambridge Companions to Austen, Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and the traditional major figures in poetry.

History/Historical Background

• Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries
• James Chandler, England in 1819
• Linda Colley, Britons
• Leonore Davidoff & Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850
• C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and San Domingo Revolution
• Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832
• E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
• Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England
• Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950