English 4/805B: Nineteenth Century Fiction:
Fiction of the Romantic Period
Fall 2002
Stephen C. Behrendt
319 Andrews; 472-1806
office: 10:00 -11:00 TR
and by appointment
James Gillray, Presages of the Millenium (1795)
Corvey Novels Course Project
Part of your work in this course involves exploring the range of fiction that was published and widely read during the Romantic period, c. 1780-1835. Most of you have heard of traditional, canonical novelists like William Godwin, Mary Robinson, Ann Radcliffe, James Hogg, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley, some of whose works you may already have read. You may also know about novelists like Amelia Opie, Charlotte Smith, Charlotte Dacre, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Hays, Charles Maturin, and Matthew Lewis, even if you have not previously read any of their novels. But there were literally hundreds of active novelists working during the Romantic period, and they were often both prolific and widely read. Many of these authors have been almost invisible for the past two centuries or so, in part because their works either did not "fit" standard definitions of Romantic fiction or were not republished after their first appearance and therefore were lost to succeeding generations of readers. Their loss from the literary "landscape" of British Romanticism, however, has meant that what students, scholars, and teachers have for many decades come to regard as the Romantic literary "landscape" is in fact quite different from the historical reality, a fact that has had large consequences for traditional assessments of British Romanticism.
One of the most important developments in scholarship about the British Romantic era has been the project of recovering historically neglected or marginalized writers, a development that has taken place principally in the last decade and a half and that continues unabated today as the lives and works of literally hundreds of authors are being reassessed for what they tell us not just about themselves (and their authors) but also for what they tell us about the complex, dynamic, and volatile culture of the Romantic era. The results of these projects in recovery are only gradually making their mark upon scholarship (and teaching) concerning British Romanticism, but their effects have already proven to be profound. Indeed, the course you are presently taking, in "Fiction of the Romantic Period" is very different – in content and in scope – from what a course by the same name might have been even so recently as ten years ago.
As part of your work for this course, you will make your own contribution to the recovery of neglected authors and works of the period as part of a critical exercise that will make a tangible contribution to scholarship both here at UNL and around the world, via the Internet. As part of a remarkably forward-thinking initiative, the University Libraries have acquired a microform collection called the "Edition Corvey," a collection that offers the best and most complete picture of Romantic literary writing and publishing in England (and France and Germany) to be found anywhere. The collection consists of microfiche copies of nearly ten thousand titles (many of them by women) of literary texts dating primarily from 1780- 1840. No comparable resource exists anywhere in the world – except, of course, at the Castle Corvey in Germany, where the original books are housed and where they have been micro-copied. Indeed, UNL is at this point one of only two universities in the United States to own the entire Corvey Collection (that is, the complete sets of English, German, and French works).
For your project, I will ask you to select one of the novels from the Corvey Collection as the centerpiece for your own project of scholarly discovery and recovery. UNL has partnered with several British universities to develop materials for the study and evaluation of the works in the Corvey Collection, and we have elected to concentrate first on the works of women writers, primarily because those works (and their authors) have historically been the most marginalized, in spite of their considerable reputations in their own times and the large numbers of readers they enjoyed. I will give you a list of authors and works that are especially in need of attention, and I will ask that you select one novel for the basis of your work.
Here is what you will do:
1. Read the novel in its entirety. The novels are available on microfiche at the Microforms Collection in Love Library, where the staff will be prepared to help you with your work (they know about this assignment and about my expectations for you). You can make a paper copy of your novel (paying with a copycard) in the Microforms Room, or you can borrow a microfiche reader from Microforms (they have about a dozen available for free two-week, non-renewable rental). They will also make copies of the microfiche cards themselves for 25¢ each. Most novels are complete on no more than 4 fiches, so this is the cheapest way to read, though you do not get the advantage of a paper copy.
2. Prepare a synopsis of the novel. This is simply a basic plot summary, running to perhaps three or four typed pages. I will give you samples to guide you. You will find other samples on the Sheffield Hallam University Corvey Project website (I will demonstrate these resources in class). I will ask you to submit your synopsis in both a paper format and in electronic form (as a Microsoft Word document or attachment, if at all possible). My intention is to mount them on a website for use by students and scholars worldwide; we will either contribute them to the Sheffield Hallam site (probably the CW3 site there) or I will put them up on a website I run here at UNL that focuses on Studies in Romanticism here. In either case, they will appear with your name, so that you will have a genuine publication credit. More important, you will make a real contribution to scholarship in this terribly important field.
3. Locate and copy as many reviews of the novel as you can from among periodicals (and other relevant sources) from the time of the novel's publication. The Microforms Collection includes wonderful microfilm holdings in literary (and other) periodicals from England during the Romantic era, with bibliographical aids to help you find what you need. I will demonstrate some of these materials and how to use them, and the Microforms staff will be willing (and able) to help you at any time, when you go there to work. I will ask you to prepare these copies of reviews also in both conventional paper and electronic form (in MS Word format), the latter to be mounted on the Internet.
4. Find out as much as you can about the author, again using resources available at Love Library (and to some extent on the Internet), and prepare a brief critical biography of your author that pays particular attention to any circumstances connected with the novel you have chosen. These, too, should be prepared in paper and in electronic format.
5. Finally, prepare a concise critical essay on the novel you have chosen. You should try to assess the novel on its own terms (i. e., do a formal analysis), but that analysis should also reflect what you are learning both about your author (from your other research) and about the historical, cultural, and literary/intellectual milieu in which she worked (from what we do in our class sessions and what research you conduct on your own). For this essay, I shall ask you for two paper copies, one of which I will keep for the documentary archive I am assembling here at UNL to accompany the Corvey Collection materials.
6. Discuss your findings during the last several weeks of the course, when I have reserved class time for brief presentations by each of you. I would like to have you make sufficient copies of your novel synopsis for everyone in the class to have one, if we can find a way to make the cost reasonable (small fonts, for one thing!) I will also hold open some times during the semester for you to ask questions, report problems, and share progress.