Scholarly Resources

Romantic Circles Scholarly Resources is a collection of online research tools approved by the General Editors of the site, intended for the study of the Romantics, their contemporaries, and their cultural contexts.

April 2014

An Island in the Moon
An Island in the Moon is an incomplete manuscript written in pen and ink in Blake’s hand. It contains the earliest extant drafts of "Nurse’s Song," "Holy Thursday," and "The Little Boy Lost," which make their first published appearance in his Songs of Innocence (1789). Topical allusions and the history of Blake’s associations with the London social circle of the Rev. A. S. Mathew and his wife Harriet in the 1780s suggest a period of composition c. 1784-85. The use of dialogue interspersed with song lyrics links the narrative to both contemporary theatrical forms and broader eighteenth-century satirical traditions. Blake and his brother Robert play central roles as the philosophers “Quid” and “Suction.” Although Blake left it orphaned, untitled, and unfinished in a heavily revised manuscript, Island is in some sense a primary literary experiment for him, setting the undertone of much to follow.
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October 2012

Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies
Originally intended to introduce a study of William Blake’s later prophecies, the late Karl Kroeber’s Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies is an accessible and astute survey of the prophetic work that Blake executed between 1788 and 1794. For Kroeber (1926-2009), former Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, the post-secular era we are now entering should be prepared to recognize Blake’s centrality in academic literary humanism, which—in its secular phase—excluded Blake on account of his radical Christianity. Such exclusion, Kroeber points out, has not diminished Blake’s immense—and still growing—impact on popular culture, on our music, fiction, film, and graphic novels, as well as on our ideas of creativity, spirituality, and individuality. In stark contrast to the idea of a “universal heart” and to the ideal rational societies envisioned by other Romantic writers, Blake argued that each individual was unique and that only complex social structures based, not on reason, but on the imagination, like Golgonooza, the City of Art, can realize and sustain the individual’s innate divinity.
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Draft Variants from the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts and the New Edition of Laon and Cythna in The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume III
This article serves as an online supplement to Laon and Cythna as edited by Michael J. Neth in Volume III of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. It contains a record of every known draft variant of the poem, from surviving first draft through intermediate stages to surviving press copy, with the exception of stray letters and marks. The italicized editorial apparatus gives a description of the context of each line and will help textually-inclined readers with access to the published facsimile transcriptions listed locate any passage they wish to examine in greater depth.
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August 2012

John Thelwall in Performance: The Fairy of the Lake
This resource documents the first full production of a John Thelwall play. It contains an introductory essay by Judith Thompson and a full performance video of the 2009 Dalhousie/Zuppa Theatre production of Thelwall’s 1801 “dramatic romance,” as well as a series of series of short video documentaries by student filmmaker Brooke Fifield, exploring the creative challenges, practical considerations and unexpected delights involved in bringing a long-neglected piece of radical Romantic theatre from dusty page to modern stage.
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John Thelwall in Time and Text
In the absence of a full biography, this resource fulfills an urgent need to gather, collate, and circulate existing biographical and bibliographical information on the notoriously under-documented career of Romantic polymath John Thelwall in an accessible location and format. This chronology and bibliography charts what is thus far known about Thelwall’s residences and travels, his chief activities, his writings and lectures, and his correspondence, along with related events, and locations where primary texts can be found.
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July 2008

A Chronological Listing of the Letters of Joanna Baillie
This chronology orders all known Baillie letters and provides more accurate dates and identifications for many of the previously published letters. By providing watermarks, the place of writing, and the correspondents' names, the chronology also gives a new vantage point from which to view Baillie's life and times. It is published in conjunction with the Romantic Circles Praxis volume Utopianism and Joanna Baillie, edited by Regina Hewitt, to which Thomas McLean contributed an essay explaining this chronological listing.
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April 2008

Romantic Circles Bibliography
Intended to help Romanticists keep informed about recent publications in the field, this resource offers the Tables of Contents to recent editions of selected Romantics journals, and offers an annual listing of books that are likely to be of interest to students of Romanticism.
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August 2007

William Taylor of Norwich: A Study of the Influence of Modern German Literature in England (1897)
This is a critical biography of William Taylor of Norwich (1765-1836), translated from the German of Georg Herzfeld (1897), with additional introduction and notes. Translated by Astrid Wind, edited with an introduction by David Chandler.
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July 2007

Wordsworth's Dramatic Antipicturesque: Burke, Gilpin, and "Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree"
In this essay, Joseph Viscomi reads William Wordsworth's "Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree" and its revisions as part of an antipicturesque discourse critical of William Gilpin's and Edmund Burke's theories of nature.
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March 2007

The Wordsworth Circle, Special Issue in Honor of Karl Kroeber
This special edition of The Wordsworth Circle, published in honor of  Karl Kroeber, is available courtesy of Romantic Circles in a PDF format.  Edited by Toby Benis, this issue includes articles by Carl Woodring, Martin Meisel, David Simpson, Gillen D'Arcy Wood, James McKusick, Joseph Viscomi, Regina Hewitt, William Deresiewicz, Mark Jones, Steven E. Jones, Marilyn Gaull, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
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September 2006

Quarterly Review Electronic Texts
Digitized version of the Quarterly Review, beginning with volume one (1809), including all articles, paratextual materials, and an introduction by the editor.
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January 2006

Fictions of Byron: An Annotated Bibliography
This annotated bibliography compiled by G. Todd Davis summarizes numerous works of the 19th and 20th centuries that incorporate Lord Byron as a major or a minor character. Using historical and intertextual perspectives, this bibliography embodies Byronism, defined here as the production and reproduction of the Byron legend.
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Shelley Sites/Sights
Take a pictoral journey through the life of Percy Shelley, from his birth at Field Place in Sussex, to his final resting place at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. In between, visit sites important to Shelley in England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and the Continent, particularly Italy. Pictures and text by Darby Lewes and Bob Stiklus.
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March 2005

An Electronic Concordance to Keats' Poetry
A searchable concordance based on Jack Stillinger's The Poems of John Keats.
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February 2005

The Quarterly Review Archive
The Quarterly Review Archive supplies original attributions of articles published in the Quarterly during William Gifford's tenure (1809-25). The site also includes extensive notes on each of the articles, annotated transcriptions of letters by William Gifford and John Murray, information about sales and publication dates, a chronology of the founding of the journal and a bibliography of contemporary responses to the Quarterly's articles.
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August 2002

Fictional Representations of Romantics & Romanticism

A hypertextual list of novels, short stories, plays, films, and other fictional representations of historical Romantic figures, this resource began with a query to NASSR-L about the Romantics in science fiction; it includes a hyperlinked and annotated bibliography.

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August 2001

Wordsworth's Route Over the Simplon in 1790
In August 2001, Roger Meyenberg and Patrick Vincent hiked Wordsworth's route over the Simplon Pass, as described in Book VI of The Prelude. Their goal was to establish, of several reconstructed versions of the hike, which route Wordsworth and Robert Jones most likely followed. Includes their narrative and photographs of the pass today.
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November 2000

The Byron Chronology
The Byron Chronology is a searchable hypertext chronology of important dates in the life of George Gordon, Lord Byron. It draws almost exclusively from Leslie Marchand's standard three-volume biography of Byron's life, with some additions from the material in Marchand's edition of Byron's Letters and Journals.
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December 1998

Conference Archive
An archive of program copy from conferences and sessions of special interest to Romanticists. It includes a complete record of NASSR and ACR conference programs, as well as those of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Assocation, the Keats-Shelley Association, and the Byron Society, and the Romantics section of the MLA.
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March 1998

The Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Chronology & Resource Site

This resource provides a detailed chronology of Mary Shelley's life and work, as well as several contemporary reviews of her novels and of a play inspired by Frankenstein.

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Shelley's Notebooks in the Bodleian Library
This resource presents a detailed index of Shelley's notebooks in the Bodleian, Huntington, C. H. Pforzheimer, British, and Pierpont Morgan Libraries. This index was created from a revised version of Tatsuo Tokoo's article originally published in _Humanities: Bulletin of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto Prefectural University_ [ISSN 0075-7381], No. 36 (December 1984), pp. 1-32.
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The Percy Bysshe Shelley Chronology
An annotated hypertext timeline of important dates in the life and work of Percy Bysshe Shelley, this chronology is designed to function both as a stand-alone resource and in conjunction with The Romantic Chronology at UC Santa Barbara.
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