LibGuides: Romantic British Literature: Read the Lit

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Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen Catherine, a seventeen year old girl, travels with her family to Bath and makes many new acquaintance, including two young men who pursue her. She is invited to visit the country estate of one, and makes the journey with high expectations of Gothic drama, her head being full of Mrs Radcliffe's The Mystery of Udolpho. This was the first novel completed by Austen, but was only published posthumously. It is a delightful, light-hearted comment by Austen on the reading and writing of novels.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Mr and Mrs Bennet have five unmarried daughters. When the amiable Mr Bingly moves into the neighbourhood, Mrs Bennet therefore feels entirely sure that he is meant for one of her girls. Her eldest Miss Bennet captures his attention, but Mr Bingley's proud friend Mr Darcy does not approve the match and takes his friend away to London. Though not before losing his own heart to the second eldest, Lizzie. With an indolent father on one side and a nervous, ignorant mother on the other, the girls soon find themselves in the middle of a disaster which throws them back in with the two gentlemen. All parties must re-think their pride and the prejudice of first impressions. Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's most famous novel.
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen When Mr. Dashwood dies, he leaves his second wife and her three daughters at the mercy of his son and heir, John. John's wife convinces him to turn his step-mother and half-sisters out, and they move to a country cottage, rented to them by a distant relative. In their newly reduced circumstances Elinor and Marianne, the two eldest daughters, wrestle with ideas of romance and reality and their apparent opposition to each other. Elinor struggles in silent propriety, while Marianne is as violently romantic as her ideals. Life, however, teaches the girls to balance sense and sensibility in their approach to love and marriage. Sense and Sensibility was Jane Austen's first novel to be published, in 1811.
Don Juan by Lord Byron In his satiric poem Don Juan, Lord Byron refigures the legend as a man easily seduced by women, rather than as a dangerous womanizer. When the first two cantos were anonymously published in 1819, they were criticized for being immoral. They were also immensely popular. Byron only completed 16 cantos, leaving the 17th unwritten when he died in 1824. Don Juan is commonly considered to be his masterpiece.
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, was completed by Mary Shelley at the age of 19. She infused this original novel with Gothic and Romantic elements. Scientist Victor Frankenstein creates a large and powerful creature in the likeness of man, but is disgusted by his own creation and he abandons the being to fend for itself. Spawning generations of horror stories in the genre, Frankenstein is a gruesome warning against playing God and attempting the engineering of life.
The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley - Vol 1 by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poems and Songs by Robert Burns Robert Burns (1759 - 1796) called himself "an Aeolian harp strung to every wind of heaven." His first volume of poems, entitled Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was published in 1786. An immediate success, it established Burns's poetic reputation, which has grown over two centuries to the point where he is not only the Scottish national poet but the object of a cult unique in British poetry. The present volume contains 43 of his finest poems and songs, reprinted unabridged from an authoritative tenth-century edition. Included are "The Twa Dogs," a deft satire of the Scottish upper classes; "To a Mouse," one of the poet's best known, most charming works; "Address to the Unco Guid," an attack on Puritan hypocrisy; "Holy Willie's Prayer," one of the great verse-satires of all times; as well as such favorites as "The Cotter's Saturday Night," "To a Mountain Daisy," "The Holy Fair," "Address to the Deil," "The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie," and many more. In addition to his poetic undertakings, Burns almost single-handedly preserved and revived the traditional Scottish song, and this volume includes a rich selection of these works: "A Red, Red Rose," "Auld Lang Syne," "Comin' thro' the Rye," "My Heart's in the Highlands," "My Love, She's But a Lassie Yet," and a host of others.
Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge A mariner stops a man on his way to a wedding. The mariner then relates to the man all the events of a long sea voyage, arousing in his listener feeling of impatience, fear, fascination and bemusement. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was published in the collection Lyrical Ballads (1798), which contributed significantly to the advent of modern poetry and the beginnings of British Romance literature.
The Poems of William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth The three-volume edition of Wordsworth's poems is the most comprehensive edition now in print and contains reading texts chosen from the 21 volumes of the Cornell Wordsworth. It is without a doubt the most pleasurable way to read Wordsworth's poems in their entirety. Volume 2 includes the thirteen-book Prelude of 1805-06, Benjamin the Waggoner, The Tuft of Primroses (and other poems composed for the unfinished Recluse), The Excursion (in the text of the first edition in 1814), The White Doe of Rylstone, and translations from Chaucer and Virgil. This title is also available as a searchable PDF ebook, from Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk, or to Lbraries from Ingram Digital. A Free PDF Addendum to this edition is now available from Humanities-Eooks, containing additional texts of An Evening Walk, The Baker's Cart, The Ruined Cottage, Nutting, Yew-Trees, the odes of 1815-17, Nab Well and Guilt and Sorrow, with the full 40-page index to the three printed volumes. With the Addendum the complete 3-volume edition is now 2600 pages. The editor, Jared Curtis, is Professor Emeritus of English at Simon Fraser University, also edited 'Poems, in Two Volumes' and Other Poems, 1800-1807, Last Poems, 1821-1850, and was co-editor with Carol Landon of Early Poems and Fragments, 1785-1797, all in the Cornell Wordsworth.

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The Works of Lord Byron by George Gordon Byron As outspoken in his day as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens are today, American freethinker and author ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL (1833-1899) was a notorious radical whose uncompromising views on religion and slavery (they were bad, in his opinion), women's suffrage (a good idea, he believed), and other contentious matters of his era made him a wildly popular orator and critic of 19th-century American culture and public life. As a speaker dedicated to expanding intellectual horizons and celebrating the value of skepticism, Ingersoll spoke frequently on such topics as atheism, freedom from the pressures of conformity, and the lives of philosophers who espoused such concepts. This collection of his most famous speeches includes the lectures: [ "The Gods" (1872) [ "Humboldt" (1869) [ "Thomas Paine" (1870) [ "Individuality" (1873) [ "Heretics and Heresies" (1874)
Jane Austen's Letters by Jane Austen Jane Austen's letters afford a unique insight into the daily life of the novelist: intimate and gossipy, observant and informative, they bring alive her family and friends, her surroundings and contemporary events with a freshness unparalleled in biography. Above all we recognize theunmistakable voice of the author of Pride and Prejudice, witty and amusing as she describes the social life of town and country, thoughtful and constructive when writing about the business of literary composition. R. W. Chapman's ground-breaking edition of the collected Letters first appeared in 1932, and a second edition followed twenty years later. A third edition, edited by Deidre Le Faye in 1997, added new material, re-ordered the letters into their correct chronological sequence, and provided discreetand full annotation to each letter, including its provenance, and information on the watermarks, postmarks, and other physical details of the manuscripts. This fourth edition incorporates the findings of new scholarship to enrich our understanding of Austen and give us the fullest and most revealingview yet of her life and family. There is a new preface, the biographical and topographical indexes have been amended and updated, a new subject index has been created, and the contents of the notes added to the general index.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen No novel in English has given more pleasure than Pride and Prejudice. Because it is one of the great works in our literature, critics in every generation reexamine and reinterpret it. But the rest of us simply fall in love with it--and with its wonderfully charming and intelligent heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. And everyone is held fast not only by the novel's romantic suspense but also by the fascinations of the world we visit. The life of the English country gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century is made as real to us as our own, not only by the author's wit and feeling but by her subtle observation of the way people behave in society and how we are true or treacherous to each other and to ourselves. "Jane Austen remains the most misunderstood of great English writers . . . Austen's is an extended, exploratory, dangerously subversive art, and is neither harmlessly decorative nor picturesquely provincial . . . [Irony] is the secret of the perfect self-sufficiency of Pride and Prejudice."--from the Introduction by Peter Conrad (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
The Complete Poems of John Keats (with an Introduction by Robert Bridges) by John Keats Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats is considered one of the most important figures in the second generation of English Romantic poets. Born on Halloween in 1795, John Keats lived a very short life, dying at the age of twenty-five from tuberculosis. In 1814 John Keats began an apprenticeship with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary and by 1816 had achieved his apothecary's license, which allowed him to practice medicine. However Keats passion lied elsewhere and by the end of 1816 he was resolved to be a poet and not a surgeon. Despite his short life, Keats produced an immense volume of poetry; however the esteem of his reputation rests primarily on the quality of his Odes, which are marked by their use of sensual imagery. Keats was not well-received during his lifetime and sensing his imminent death viewed himself as a failure as is evidenced by the following statement written in an 1820 letter to Fanny Brawne: "I have left no immortal work behind me-nothing to make my friends proud of my memory-but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd." History of course has remembered Keats differently, as one of the truly great poetic talents of all-time. This edition includes his complete poetical works, is printed on a premium acid-free paper and includes an introduction by Britain's poet laureate Robert Bridges.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley If you love a good story, then look no further. Oxford Children's Classics bring together the most unforgettable stories ever told. They're books to treasure and return to again and again.Scientist Victor Frankenstein, is determined to create intelligent life. He works night and day on his experiment until at last he succeeds. Only then does he realize that what he has created is a monster. Abandoned by its maker and rejected by everyone it meets, the monster sets out to destroy Frankenstein and everything he holds dear.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft The first great manifesto of women's rights, published in 1792 and an immediate best seller, made its author the toast of radical circles and the target of reactionary ones. Writing just after the French and American revolutions, Mary Wollstonecraft firmly established the demand for women's emancipation in the context of the ever-widening urge for human rights and individual freedom that surrounded those two great upheavals. She thereby opened the richest, most productive vein in feminist thought, and her success can be judged by the fact that her once radical polemic, through the efforts of the innumerable writers and activities she influenced, has become the accepted wisdom of the modern era. Challenging the prevailing culture that trained women to be nothing more than docile, decorative wives and mothers, Wollstonecraft was an ardent advocate of equal education and the full development of women's rational capacities. Having supported herself independently as a governess and teacher before finding success as a writer, and having conducted unconventional relationships with men, Wollstonecraft faced severe criticism both for her life choices and for her ideas. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she dared to ask a question whose urgency is undiminished in our time: how can women be both female and free?