—
The Corvey Poets Project at the University of Nebraska —
—
The Corvey Poets Project at the University of Nebraska —
British Poetry of the later Eighteenth and Earlier Nineteenth Centuries
Bibliographical and Contextual Apparatus
Background and Overview of the Project
The Corvey Collection
The Corvey Poets Project
Links for the Corvey Poets Project
Index of Authors currently represented on the Corvey
Poets Project website
Background and Overview of the Project
No matter how we choose to define and to date what we usually call the English Romantic period, the poetry that was produced during that volatile era involved far more than just five (or six) canonical male poets familiar from traditional canonical literary history. The period saw the publication of literally thousands of volumes of poetry, written by women and men alike. Often these poets knew one another's work; many knew one another personally as well. Therefore, when we look closely we may recognize how frequently, and in how very informed a fashion, the poems of this period engage in deliberate and complex intertextual conversations, conversations in which the poetry's readers among the general public themselves were often very knowledgeable participants. As the complex intertextuality of Romantic poetry – and indeed of Romantic discourse in general – has become increasingly apparent to scholars working in the field, revisionist studies of English Romanticism have, especially in the last decade or so, yielded a dramatically altered picture of the Romantic period and of its poetry, a picture that continues to change and to evolve as more and more of the era's literary production is recovered, examined, and evaluated.
Even the definition of a Romantic "period" has become an issue in
recent years. Some 18th-century scholars have suggested that what we call the
"romantic period" simply be added to what those scholars then call
"the long eighteenth century." Others, working from the other end
of the timeline, have suggested that in many respects the Victorian era begins
not with Victoria's coronation in 1837 but rather with the accession of her
uncle (the Prince of Wales) to the position of Prince Regent in 1811. Among
Romanticists, the counter-argument to both these propositions is that the Romantic
era is a time of volatility and change whose roots begin to be apparent already
at about the time of Charlotte Turner Smith's birth in 1749 and whose terminus
coincides with the death of William Wordsworth in 1850. Probably a reasonable
compromise involves at least tentatively identifying the "Romantic period"
in Great Britain with the period extending from about 1775 to about 1835, or
some sixty years. Elements of what is typically characterized as Romanticism
appear both before and after those dates, of course, just as elements of both
Enlightenment and Victorian ideology are to be found throughout these sixty
years.
The University of Nebraska Libraries houses a remarkable research archive of Romantic-era literary texts that can be found in only a few other research institutions in the United States: the "Corvey Collection." This collection, which the University Libraries owns in the form of microfiche copies, includes more than 3200 titles in English alone, including especially prose fiction but also poetry, drama, and other literary texts. The collection covers the entire Romantic period, but it is especially strong in the period after 1815. The Libraries also own the companion archives in French and German literature, which brings the total number of titles included in these three collections to well over 9000. This collection constitutes one of the most comprehensive – and therefore most valuable – resources for research in the literary culture of Europe during the Romantic era.
Here at the University of Nebraska we have begun to cooperate with several other institutions – most notably Sheffield Hallam University (Sheffield, United Kingdom) and Cardiff University (Cardiff, United Kingdom) – to make available in electronic form to scholars around the world a variety of bibliographical and other supplementary materials relating to the Corvey collection. The project at Sheffield Hallam University focuses particularly upon women writers, while the primary focus of the project at Cardiff University is Romantic-era fiction. At the University of Nebraska we have begun to assemble and mount to this website a collection of related materials that complement and supplement the work being done in these two British projects. Our aims are twofold: (1) to supplement the projects at Sheffield Hallam and Cardiff; and (2) to provide alternative sources of primary and secondary information to assist scholars and teachers worldwide in further investigating the rich diversity of Romantic-era texts literary texts from Great Britain.
A separate portion of the website you are viewing is devoted specifically to novels in the Corvey Collection; you can access that area by clicking here. There you will find information about individual novels, including synopses of their plots, transcriptions of contemporary reviews, and other biographical and bibliographical apparatus.
The part of the website which you are viewing represents the beginning of a parallel project that aims to make available comparable information about volumes of poetry in English to be found in the Corvey Collection. This information is supplemented here also by information concerning other volumes of poetry, chiefly by women, that are held in collections elsewhere (chiefly in the Kohler Collection at the University of California, Davis). When such volumes are the subject of entries on this website, you will usually find active links to those works and to the institutions that own them.
Links for the Corvey Poets Project
Bibliography of volumes of poetry by women in the Corvey Collection
Bibliography of volumes of poetry by men in the Corvey Collection
Index of Authors currently represented on the Corvey Poetry Project website