Scholarly Resources

Romantic Circles Scholarly Resources is a collection of online research tools approved by the General Editors of the site, intended for the study of the Romantics, their contemporaries, and their cultural contexts.

Mary Shelley's The Last Man: Abridged Edition | February 2022

"Throughout my teaching experiences, especially in seminars that have covered the life and works of the Shelleys, Lord Byron, and other writers of the age, reading The Last Man at the end has consistently provided a stimulating and memorable culmination. This is because these pages are filled with familiar material, even if one has not read the novel before. But asking my students to complete such extensive reading at the term’s conclusion invariably felt demanding and onerous. For pragmatic purposes, therefore, I decided to create the following abridgment, truncating the original narrative by more than a third of its length. It is my hope that, while offering greater exposure to this important novel in classes around the world, this free and open-access edition is used as originally intended: as a pathway toward—rather than a replacement for—the novel in its entirety."

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Hubert Parry’s Scenes from Prometheus Unbound | December 2020

A Selection of Piano Recordings by Jennifer Castleton

On the 140th Anniversary of Parry’s Composition
and the Bicentenary of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound

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Charlotte Smith Story Map | May 2018

The British author Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806), best known for her acclaimed and innovative Elegiac Sonnets (1784), has a life story as interesting and difficult as her literature was admired and influential. This StoryMap, by Elizabeth A. Dolan and Gillian Andrews, demonstrates the way in which Smith's residential (in)security was related to her dependence on her father and husband, a situation common to eighteenth-century women. The Charlotte Smith Story Map is the first piece of scholarship to integrate information from all the known letters that Smith wrote; those included in Judith Stanton's 2003 Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, and also all the letters discovered in the last 15 years.

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An Island in the Moon | April 2014
An Island in the Moon is an incomplete manuscript written in pen and ink in Blake’s hand. It contains the earliest extant drafts of "Nurse’s Song," "Holy Thursday," and "The Little Boy Lost," which make their first published appearance in his Songs of Innocence (1789). Topical allusions and the history of Blake’s associations with the London social circle of the Rev. A. S. Mathew and his wife Harriet in the 1780s suggest a period of composition c. 1784-85. The use of dialogue interspersed with song lyrics links the narrative to both contemporary theatrical forms and broader eighteenth-century satirical traditions. Blake and his brother Robert play central roles as the philosophers “Quid” and “Suction.” Although Blake left it orphaned, untitled, and unfinished in a heavily revised manuscript, Island is in some sense a primary literary experiment for him, setting the undertone of much to follow.
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Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies | October 2012
Originally intended to introduce a study of William Blake’s later prophecies, the late Karl Kroeber’s Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies is an accessible and astute survey of the prophetic work that Blake executed between 1788 and 1794. For Kroeber (1926-2009), former Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, the post-secular era we are now entering should be prepared to recognize Blake’s centrality in academic literary humanism, which—in its secular phase—excluded Blake on account of his radical Christianity. Such exclusion, Kroeber points out, has not diminished Blake’s immense—and still growing—impact on popular culture, on our music, fiction, film, and graphic novels, as well as on our ideas of creativity, spirituality, and individuality. In stark contrast to the idea of a “universal heart” and to the ideal rational societies envisioned by other Romantic writers, Blake argued that each individual was unique and that only complex social structures based, not on reason, but on the imagination, like Golgonooza, the City of Art, can realize and sustain the individual’s innate divinity.
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Draft Variants from the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts and the New Edition of Laon and Cythna in The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume III | October 2012
This article serves as an online supplement to Laon and Cythna as edited by Michael J. Neth in Volume III of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. It contains a record of every known draft variant of the poem, from surviving first draft through intermediate stages to surviving press copy, with the exception of stray letters and marks. The italicized editorial apparatus gives a description of the context of each line and will help textually-inclined readers with access to the published facsimile transcriptions listed locate any passage they wish to examine in greater depth.
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John Thelwall in Performance: The Fairy of the Lake | August 2012
This resource documents the first full production of a John Thelwall play. It contains an introductory essay by Judith Thompson and a full performance video of the 2009 Dalhousie/Zuppa Theatre production of Thelwall’s 1801 “dramatic romance,” as well as a series of series of short video documentaries by student filmmaker Brooke Fifield, exploring the creative challenges, practical considerations and unexpected delights involved in bringing a long-neglected piece of radical Romantic theatre from dusty page to modern stage.
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John Thelwall in Time and Text | August 2012
In the absence of a full biography, this resource fulfills an urgent need to gather, collate, and circulate existing biographical and bibliographical information on the notoriously under-documented career of Romantic polymath John Thelwall in an accessible location and format. This chronology and bibliography charts what is thus far known about Thelwall’s residences and travels, his chief activities, his writings and lectures, and his correspondence, along with related events, and locations where primary texts can be found.
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A Chronological Listing of the Letters of Joanna Baillie | July 2008
This chronology orders all known Baillie letters and provides more accurate dates and identifications for many of the previously published letters. By providing watermarks, the place of writing, and the correspondents' names, the chronology also gives a new vantage point from which to view Baillie's life and times. It is published in conjunction with the Romantic Circles Praxis volume Utopianism and Joanna Baillie, edited by Regina Hewitt, to which Thomas McLean contributed an essay explaining this chronological listing.
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Romantic Circles Bibliography | April 2008
Intended to help Romanticists keep informed about recent publications in the field, this resource offers the Tables of Contents to recent editions of selected Romantics journals, and offers an annual listing of books that are likely to be of interest to students of Romanticism.
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William Taylor of Norwich: A Study of the Influence of Modern German Literature in England (1897) | August 2007
This is a critical biography of William Taylor of Norwich (1765-1836), translated from the German of Georg Herzfeld (1897), with additional introduction and notes. Translated by Astrid Wind, edited with an introduction by David Chandler.
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Wordsworth's Dramatic Antipicturesque: Burke, Gilpin, and "Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree" | July 2007
In this essay, Joseph Viscomi reads William Wordsworth's "Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree" and its revisions as part of an antipicturesque discourse critical of William Gilpin's and Edmund Burke's theories of nature.
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The Wordsworth Circle, Special Issue in Honor of Karl Kroeber | March 2007
This special edition of The Wordsworth Circle, published in honor of  Karl Kroeber, is available courtesy of Romantic Circles in a PDF format.  Edited by Toby Benis, this issue includes articles by Carl Woodring, Martin Meisel, David Simpson, Gillen D'Arcy Wood, James McKusick, Joseph Viscomi, Regina Hewitt, William Deresiewicz, Mark Jones, Steven E. Jones, Marilyn Gaull, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
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Quarterly Review Electronic Texts | September 2006
Digitized version of the Quarterly Review, beginning with volume one (1809), including all articles, paratextual materials, and an introduction by the editor.
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Fictions of Byron: An Annotated Bibliography | January 2006
This annotated bibliography compiled by G. Todd Davis summarizes numerous works of the 19th and 20th centuries that incorporate Lord Byron as a major or a minor character. Using historical and intertextual perspectives, this bibliography embodies Byronism, defined here as the production and reproduction of the Byron legend.
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Shelley Sites/Sights | January 2006
Take a pictoral journey through the life of Percy Shelley, from his birth at Field Place in Sussex, to his final resting place at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. In between, visit sites important to Shelley in England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and the Continent, particularly Italy. Pictures and text by Darby Lewes and Bob Stiklus.
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An Electronic Concordance to Keats' Poetry | March 2005
A searchable concordance based on Jack Stillinger's The Poems of John Keats.
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The Quarterly Review Archive | February 2005
The Quarterly Review Archive supplies original attributions of articles published in the Quarterly during William Gifford's tenure (1809-25). The site also includes extensive notes on each of the articles, annotated transcriptions of letters by William Gifford and John Murray, information about sales and publication dates, a chronology of the founding of the journal and a bibliography of contemporary responses to the Quarterly's articles.
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Fictional Representations of Romantics & Romanticism | August 2002

A hypertextual list of novels, short stories, plays, films, and other fictional representations of historical Romantic figures, this resource began with a query to NASSR-L about the Romantics in science fiction; it includes a hyperlinked and annotated bibliography.

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Wordsworth's Route Over the Simplon in 1790 | August 2001
In August 2001, Roger Meyenberg and Patrick Vincent hiked Wordsworth's route over the Simplon Pass, as described in Book VI of The Prelude. Their goal was to establish, of several reconstructed versions of the hike, which route Wordsworth and Robert Jones most likely followed. Includes their narrative and photographs of the pass today.
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The Byron Chronology | November 2000
The Byron Chronology is a searchable hypertext chronology of important dates in the life of George Gordon, Lord Byron. It draws almost exclusively from Leslie Marchand's standard three-volume biography of Byron's life, with some additions from the material in Marchand's edition of Byron's Letters and Journals.
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Conference Archive | December 1998
An archive of program copy from conferences and sessions of special interest to Romanticists. It includes a complete record of NASSR and ACR conference programs, as well as those of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Assocation, the Keats-Shelley Association, and the Byron Society, and the Romantics section of the MLA.
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The Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Chronology & Resource Site | March 1998

This resource provides a detailed chronology of Mary Shelley's life and work, as well as several contemporary reviews of her novels and of a play inspired by Frankenstein.

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Shelley's Notebooks in the Bodleian Library | March 1998
This resource presents a detailed index of Shelley's notebooks in the Bodleian, Huntington, C. H. Pforzheimer, British, and Pierpont Morgan Libraries. This index was created from a revised version of Tatsuo Tokoo's article originally published in _Humanities: Bulletin of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto Prefectural University_ [ISSN 0075-7381], No. 36 (December 1984), pp. 1-32.
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The Percy Bysshe Shelley Chronology |

An annotated hypertext timeline of important dates in the life and work of Percy Bysshe Shelley, this chronology is designed to function both as a stand-alone resource and in conjunction with The Romantic Chronology at UC Santa Barbara.
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