English Literature / Unit 20 ENL 1906 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Romantic Period in Review
The idea
Review twenty percent of the exam in two generations and prose. First generation: Blake's paired Songs and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Burns in Scots, Charlotte Smith's sonnets, Wordsworth's Preface, "Tintern Abbey," the Intimations Ode and The Prelude, and Coleridge's Mariner, "Kubla Khan" and Biographia. Second generation: Byron's Childe Harold and Don Juan, Shelley's West Wind, "Ozymandias" and Defence, Keats's odes and Negative Capability, and Hemans. Prose: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Austen's ironic novels, Scott's historical fiction and the essays of Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey. For any poem, ask how it joins mind and world, and tell Blake's contraries from Wordsworth's recollection and Keats's odes.
In practice
Two generations, and the novel.
Where people slip
Austen belongs to this period, though her irony is not lyric. Date by publication.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
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