Victorian Literature Commonplace Book

Commonplace books are notebooks or scrapbooks kept by readers and writers to help them reflect upon and remember useful or interesting ideas/concepts. Believed to have originated in the early modern period, commonplace books continued to be popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and could contain a variety of writing (and other media), such as: quotes, letters, poems, prayers, journal entries, recipes, images, or even advertisements.

The Sonnet and the Sequence

Rossetti's “Sonnet on the Sonnet” served not only as a gift for his mother's birthday and a reflection on a favorite poetic form. Placed at the head of The House of Life, a sonnet sequence on which Rossetti had been working for more than a dozen years, it also introduced the best known and most complete version of that work when it was published in 1881.

General Introduction

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem, "The Sonnet," is a testament to the ideals of the aesthetic movement; wedding form and content, it makes a statement about the idealizing purposes of art while illustrating the best way to achieve that purpose in the very stylistic features of a poem. The poem also betrays a number of concerns about the relation of a given aesthetic production to its reader. Is this poem a personal gift (pro Matre fecit) made for the occasion of DGR’s mother’s eightieth birthday?

Romanticism: A Class Map

Friedrich, WandererThis map is part of ENGL 202's build assignment.  Research some aspect of Romanticism and then contribute what you have learned to our shared class resource.  As the assignment states, "Add one timeline element, one map element and one gallery image about the Romantic period to our collective resources in COVE Editions.  Provide sufficient detail to explain the historical or cul