Claude Lorrain, "Apollo and the Muses on Mount Helicon," 1680.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Description of Our Project
The pages in this book history are the product of a project-based learning assignment in our Age of Austen course. This course focused on the literary genealogy of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818)-- its precursors in the Gothic and Amatory traditions. Please hover your mouse over "More" to view the pages that our class designed!
With a mind for genealogies and afterlives, we began by examining some specimens of eighteenth-century book history from the instructor's collection, which gave us an idea of how illustrations, reprints, anthologies, and materiality contribute to our understanding of a work of literature, and raise questions that modern, reprinted textbooks cannot. Next, we turned to the digital archives, including Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), and Google Books, to compile a publication history for each text. From ECCO and EEBO we discovered other valuable records: early book reviews, obituaries, spurious biographies, illustrations, and lampoons. Finally, we turned to our other library resources in order to compile a critical history of each novel and an author biography.
The students used the resources of the Weebly platform to showcase this research, learning how to be discriminating and thoughtful about what information to include. This process uncovered much of the work that goes on behind the scenes of producing an archive or learning resource that is useful to others. The project was graded on the clarity of the written content, the means by which the contributors made their research explicit and retrievable, and the appropriateness of the selected material to the genre-- to wit, the extent to which the information is informative, interactive, and easily digestible. Press the button below to see learning outcomes and responses from the student contributors.
With a mind for genealogies and afterlives, we began by examining some specimens of eighteenth-century book history from the instructor's collection, which gave us an idea of how illustrations, reprints, anthologies, and materiality contribute to our understanding of a work of literature, and raise questions that modern, reprinted textbooks cannot. Next, we turned to the digital archives, including Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), and Google Books, to compile a publication history for each text. From ECCO and EEBO we discovered other valuable records: early book reviews, obituaries, spurious biographies, illustrations, and lampoons. Finally, we turned to our other library resources in order to compile a critical history of each novel and an author biography.
The students used the resources of the Weebly platform to showcase this research, learning how to be discriminating and thoughtful about what information to include. This process uncovered much of the work that goes on behind the scenes of producing an archive or learning resource that is useful to others. The project was graded on the clarity of the written content, the means by which the contributors made their research explicit and retrievable, and the appropriateness of the selected material to the genre-- to wit, the extent to which the information is informative, interactive, and easily digestible. Press the button below to see learning outcomes and responses from the student contributors.