York Notes Companions: Romantic Literature

Dr John Gilroy (BA Newcastle: MPhil Warwick: Cert.Ed. Leeds) lectures part-time in the English Department of Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. He is a lecturer for the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education and is a course director for its international and residential programmes. His most recent publications are contributions on Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats for The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature (Steven R. Serafin & Valerie Grosvenor-Myer eds, Continuum, 2003), Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selected Poems, 2007 (www.Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk) and Philip Larkin: Selected Poems, 2009 (www.Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk). He is interested in all aspects of British Romanticism and is currently researching material on the significance of early aeronautics in the Romantic period.

• Part One: Introduction  Part Two: A Cultural Overview  Part Three: Texts, Writers and Contexts  Writing in Revolution: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and William Wordsworth Extended commentary: Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), Book IX, lines 436–           504  Revolution, Reaction and the Natural World: Wordsworth and Coleridge, John Clare and William BlakeExtended commentary: Blake, ‘The Tyger’ from Songs of Experience (1793)  Dramatic writing: Horace Walpole, Robert Southey and Lord ByronExtended commentary: Walpole, The Mysterious Mother (1768), V.i.312–420  Romantic Verse Narratives: John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor ColeridgeExtended commentary: ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner’ (1817), lines 1–40 and 610–17  Romantic Fiction: James Hogg, Thomas Love Peacock and Jane AustenExtended commentary: Austen, Persuasion (1816), Chapter 23  Romantic Travel Writing: William Beckford, Lord Byron and Mary WollstonecraftExtended commentary: Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), Letters 16 and 17   Part Four: Critical Theories and Debates Imagination, Truth and ReasonFaith, Myth and DoubtHeroes and Ant-HeroesForms of Ruin    Part Five: References and resources Timeline  Further reading  Index

"The writing is easy to read and comprehend yet manages to cram in sufficient detail... It covers topic areas very well in terms of different types of Romantic literature."- Kimberley Simpson, English Student, Warwick University