Tell about a poem in your collection that you hadn’t known before and that you like. Why do you like it? Would you say your poem is representative or emblematic of your poet’s strategies, interests, and habits in […]

Our third post asks you to think about a poem in your collection that you somehow don’t find fully convincing or satisfying. Within an entire poetry collection, any good reader is apt to discover at least one […]

Volumes of poetry — which represent an individual poet’s gathering and arranging of his or her work — invite us to think about how poems speak to and of one another. Some poets believe that structuring of a […]

Hello, Class! This is the first in our series of four posts, across the rest of the semester, on reading a poetry collection of our choice. We need to write this first post — as a “comment” in response to the […]

Here are some sources on Stevenson’s Strange Case. Remember that the back of your Broadview edition has a good bibliography. Add a good source if you know one, using the “comment” option!

Eckley, Wilton. […]

Here are some sources I (Prof. Drury!) found. If you found a useful source, please add it here in a “comment.”

Author: Griffin, Ben.
Title: The politics of gender in Victorian Britain : masculinity, […]

Post here a sentence (or two) in which you draw a connection between a secondary source and a primary text. Quote directly from your secondary source (and give a parenthetical page-number citation) as you […]

Identify a passage or two in which the Time Traveller theorizes about the world of the future he encounters. Tell us what he is trying to explain (and where the passage is), and then consider these questions. In […]

What is it like in the Time Traveller’s home, and what does Wells’s representation (through his narrator) of this domestic interior suggest about how we are to understand the Time Traveller and his ‘home world’? […]

How can we relate Oliphant’s “Library Window” to our other reading and to our discussions in the course so far? Show us a passage from the story that resonates with a text — whether one of our Victorian texts or […]

Identify a passage in “The Library Window” where vision is important. How is the experience of seeing rendered in prose, and what role does the experience have in the development of narrative? What does the […]

Return for a minute to the section of In Memoriam that we read on the first day of class, the canto that envisions a moment of contact between poetic speaker and dead friend. Identify a few words or phrases from […]

Show us one or two moments of interesting supernaturality in In Memoriam. How is the sense of supernaturality created, and what does it mean for or make happen in the poem when it occurs? Remembering the fluidity o […]

Meredith’s “Woods of Westermain” is named for real woods in the county of Surrey, England, where the poet lived. We can read the poem as inviting us on a walk: one full of obstacles, irregularity, and shifts in […]

Comment on a moment you find interesting in Scott’s first “Letter on Demonology and Witchcraft.” What is interesting about it, and what questions does it raise? Can you relate it to any of our other readings for […]

Where and how does Meredith make his woods seem supernatural?

Here is how our posting for the first weeks of the semester works. By Tuesday, 1 October, you need to have answered one question from each of our first three weeks. Remember that across the entire semester, you’re […]

Where is the boundary (or, where are the boundaries) between natural and supernatural in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”? How does the poem define them?

Compare the role of twilight in Stevenson’s Strange Case and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” With what conditions (and/or transformations) is twilight affiliated in each text? What does twilight do or make […]