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?