Poetry and Society: CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY
The Christmas term is a good opportunity to consolidate your knowledge of the Romantics. Ensure that you have read the following essays from your anthology:
•Edmund Burke, from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).
•Mary Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
•William Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800).
•S. T. Coleridge, from Biographia Literaria (1817).
•P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (extracts).
•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.
Important Books on the Romantics
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic theory and the critical tradition (Norton, 1958).
Walter J. Bate, From Classic to Romantic (Harper, 1946).
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, rebels and reactionaries (Oxford UP, 1982).
Stuart Curran, The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge UP, 1993).
Aidan Day, Romanticism (New Critical Idiom, 2000).
P. Feldman and T. Kelley, eds., Romantic Women Writers (New England UP, 1995).
Iain McCalman, An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (Oxford UP, 1999).
Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (Indiana UP, 1993).
Important Books on the Victorians
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (Routledge, 1993).
Joseph Bristow, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2002).
Richard Cronin et al, ed. A Companion to Victorian Poetry (Blackwell, 2002).
Robin Gilmour, The Victorian period : the intellectual and cultural context of English literature, 1830–1890 (Longman,
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (London, 1958).