William Wordsworth wrote his sonnet "On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway" on October 12, 1844. He was 74-years-old and living in his beloved Lake District of England. Wordsworth revered nature and his peaceful home, Dove Cottage. He fiercely objected to the advancement of the railway to the area and wrote a poem, letters, and eventually collected them into a pamphlet. The poem was originally printed in the Carlisle Journal, which can be seen here.
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The novel Shirley by Charlotte Bronte is at its heart a tale of two women, Shirley and Caroline. Poor Caroline! Abandoned by her mother and trapped by life's circumstances, she seems destined for spinsterhood. In the chapter titled "Old Maids," Caroline laments her fate.
Along with our concluding discussion of Mary Shelley's The Last Man, our reading this week included Percy Shelley's poem "Letter to Maria Gisborne." The poem was written while the Shelley's were staying in Italy, at the home of Maria Gisborne and her husband John. Shelley used an his writing room the study/workshop of Henry, Maria's son. Henry was interested in ship-building, which most
This week in class we are beginning our discussion of Mary Shelley's The Last Man. The Last Man was written eight years after Frankenstein and was published in 1826. The story is set in the future, near the end of the twenty-first century, and tells the story of the extermination of the human race by a plague. I have the Oxford World's Classics edition as shown above, but as I was a little
This week in class we are discussing British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism (1793-1815). The collection being referenced can be found on the Romantics Circle website, https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/warpoetry/index.html. As described on the website, “Romantic Circles is a refereed scholarly Website devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and
Today in class we discussed the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, specifically "Song: to the Men of England," "The Masque of Anarchy," and "England in 1819." "England in 1819" is a sonnet, and so I chose it for its brief lines and form to use for experimenting with Juxta Commons. According to their website, "Juxta is a tool that allows you to compare and collate versions of the same textual work."
This week we read Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein by Richard Brinsley Peake. Presumption, a play based on Shelley’s Frankenstein, was first performed at the English Opera House on July 28, 1823. The text of the play along with cast photos, reviews, and other relevant information can be found at http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/peake/index.html.
To conclude our study of Frankenstein, this post will examine, with the help of StoryMapJS, the time period in which Mary Shelley created her tale. In 1816, Mary Shelley and her companions spent the summer on the shores of Lake Geneva, where the unusually gloomy weather kept them indoors much of the time. The dreary atmosphere may have fueled the group’s challenge to write ghost
Tonight, our class attended a lecture given by Dr. Jacqueline Wernimont, Distinguished Chair of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. Dr. Wernimont spoke about her project Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media. Dr. Wernimont used Scalar, which “is a free, open-source
This year marks the 200-year anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Although revised in later editions, our class is reading the original 1818 text as published by Broadview Press in 1999; edited by D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. I have not read the later, more widely-known 1831 revision, but according to National Geographic, one of the chief differences is in the plot. The magazine notes
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