what do you mean, preparatory?

The following constitutes the "preparatory reading list" that I received via e-mail yesterday morning. Go ahead. Peruse.

PREPARATORY READING

1.  An Introduction to Ideas of ‘Period’. Wordsworth, The Prelude.  1805 version  with comparison with 1850 first published text, most easily done with the Norton Critical Edition.  Anthologies:  F. Palgrave (ed) The Golden Treasury, L.Trilling and H. Bloom (eds), Romantic Poetry and Prose.  Jerome McGann (ed.) The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse. Duncan Wu (ed.) Romanticism. F.O’Gorman (ed.) Victorian Poetry.  C. Ricks (ed.) The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.  I. Armstrong and J. Bristow (eds), Nineteenth-Century Women Poets.

2.  Epic ambitions. Wordsworth, The Prelude. Byron, Don Juan.  Keats, Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion. Tennyson, Morte d’Arthur; Ulysses. Yeats, Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea.

3.  The ‘Condition of England’.  Austen, Persuasion. Dickens, Bleak House. Gaskell, North and South. Eliot, Middlemarch.

4.  Elegy and the elegiac.  Wordsworth, Elegiac Stanzas . . . Peele Castle.  Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg.  Shelley, Adonais. Tennyson, Break, break, break.  In Memoriam. Crossing the Bar. Hemans, The Grave of a Poetess. Landon, Stanzas on the Death of Mrs Hemans.  Barrett Browning, Stanzas Addressed to Mrs Landon, LEL’s Last Question. Arnold, Haworth Churchyard. Thyrsis. Memorial Verses. C. Rossetti, Remember. When I am dead my Dearest. Housman, A Shropshire Lad.  Hardy, Poems, 1912-1913.

5.  Poetry and the Spiritual Quest. Wordsworth, Lines . . . Tintern Abbey, Ode: Intimations of Immortality. Coleridge, This Lime Tree Bower My Prison, Hymn in the Vale of Chamounix.  Shelley, Mont Blanc.  Tennyson, In Memoriam.  Brontë, No Coward Soul is Mine. Newman, Lead Kindly Light. Firmly I believe and truly.   Bode, O Jesus I have promised. Arnold, Dover Beach, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, The Youth of Nature, The Youth of Man, The Scholar Gypsy. C. Rossetti, In the Bleak Midwinter. Caswall, See Amid the Winter Snow.  Hopkins, Sonnets, The Wreck of the Deutschland.  Hardy, The Oxen, The Impercipient.

6.  Becoming a Heroine.  Austen, Emma, Persuasion.  Eliot, The Mill on the Floss.  Thackeray, Vanity Fair. James, The Portrait of a Lady. Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles.     

7.  The Marriage Plot.  Austen, Pride and Prejudice. C. Bronte, Jane Eyre. Eliot, Middlemarch.  Hardy, The Woodlanders, Jude the Obscure.  Wells, Ann Veronica. Forster, Howards End. Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession. Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest.

8.  The Forms of Gothic.  Shelley, Frankenstein.  Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.  Brontë, Wuthering Heights. Brontë, Jane Eyre. Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations.  Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  James, The Turn of the Screw.






as good old Doctor Ten might say: what? What? WHAT?

homeless no more!

As of yesterday, I will officially not be homeless in England. Though that would save me a fair amount of money, I suppose.

I got an e-mail yesterday from one warden Michael Mowat of Commonwealth House, who does not know how happy he has made me. Commonwealth House is an international house for students, run by St. Aldate's church and located toward the centre (note the English spelling) of town. The application as well as the CH's website stipulates that priority will be given to students from developing countries, students who do not speak much English, etc. Therefore, I applied on a pretty serious long shot, thinking only of how cool it would be to live with all the international students. And then I got accepted! Hurrah!

Now to find Corbin a place to live, which is proving even more difficult.

american mysteries

As much as I'm not the most patriotic person alive, I love the fourth of July. It amazes me that, year after year, entire sleepy towns wake up to parades and fireworks and cookouts and general jubilation at being in and of this country, at the fact that, over three hundred years ago, men whose names they can't remember liberated us from a government whose faults they can't quite name. Mild sarcasm aside, it's really spectacular. A city full of golf carts comes alive this one day a year for this one parade.

Anyway, Robby and Savi and parents and I had fun at the parade. And then Savi and I paddled our kayaks out to the middle of Lake Peachtree for the fireworks. It's pretty neat to be right in the lake, to hear the blast ricochet off the trees before it gets to us. And, of course, to dip our toes in the water. Nothing, after all, is quite so American as a good, old-fashioned, wastefully expensive display of pyrotechnics.

All in all, a good Fourth (well, third, but a good party today too). I know that I'll quite probably be back in the country by this time next year, but it doesn't feel like it. I'll miss crazy American celebrations that arise from nothing more than the fact that we're American.