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Note: in contrast to the other pages in this section which I have revised for graduate students, this page is specifically addressed to an undergraduate audience writing a paper examining the contemporary reviews of a particular author, in this case Byron. However, the advice here about evaluating contemporary reviews is pertinent to your textual history.

For larger projects, like a MA thesis or a PhD dissertation, you would want to look at everything that someone said about the work you are examining. For smaller projects, like term papers in a single course, you would identify a small chunk of that terrain and focus on that.

In ENGL 4301, we'll consider what contemporary readers and reviewers thought of a particular text.

The term we use for this kind of study is "reception": how have readers responded to this text over time? For the purposes of this project, we're only concerned with a relatively narrow unit of time: the contemporary reviews, those reviews that come out in the first year or so after a work's publication.

Conveniently, most of the contemporary reviews of Byron's poems have been collected in a facsimile edition: Donald Reiman's Romantics Reviewed Note that the table of contents only appears in the first volume, so you'll need to look at it as well as the specific volumes on Byron.

Compare Reiman's table of contents to your list of contemporary reviews from Santucho's bibliography. Does Reiman provide all the reviews that Santucho lists? If not, which ones does he eliminate? Can you speculate on why?

How many of the contemporary reviews of your poem does Reiman provide?

Reiman's volumes are organized, not by Byron's poems, but by the magazine providing the reviews. This way it would be easy, for example, to write a paper on how the Edinburgh reviewed Byron across his career.

At the beginning of each "magazine" you will find a brief note on the magazine itself: information about the editor, typical reviewers, the political leaning of the review, etc. Make sure to read this bit.

In working with reviews, look past some often-fabulous rhetoric (and frequently vitriol) to focus on the main points of the reviews. Ask yourself, "by what criteria is the reviewer judging this piece?" A good related question is this: "does the reviewer follow those criteria? meaning does the reviewer say, "I'm going to consider X," but then spend most of the review complaining about (or lauding) Y.

Pay close attention to these main points, to where the reviewer supports and diverges from them.

Watch the dates of reviews. In fact, read them in chronological order. Ask yourself questions about how the reviews relate to one another. Remember that reviewers read each others's work.

• Do some reviewers late in the game simply reassert what earlier reviews have said?
• Do some reviewers late in the game take objection to a trend in the earlier reviews?
• Which reviews seem to be most influential on later reviews?
• For how long a period do reviews of the poem come out?
• Is there any (or significant) difference between the first review and the last?
• Is there a break in the reviews--a spot where the tide turns to a new position?
• If there is a break or change in response, is there some clear reason for that change?

Once you have read all the reviews individually and have a good sense of what they find laudable and objectionable, think about them as a group.

Think in terms of trends (another word I have used in class is "currents" but you could think about "trajectory" as well):

• how many reviews were wholly positive?
• how many were wholly negative?
• how many were mixed?
• Did the negative reviews agree on what was bad about the poem?
• Likewise did the positive reviews agree on what was good?
• Do the mixed reviews comment on the same set of issues, or do they offer idiosyncratic commentary?

You might wish to also look at another book on reserve--Byron: the Critical Heritage--to see if it contains other contemporary commentary on the poem, not included in Reiman.

Now look back at your biographical information from the letters and journals.

• Does Byron record reading any of the reviews?
• If so, which ones?
• How does he respond?
• How long does it take before he reads it?
• Does he read them immediately?
• If there's a lag, what can account for that?

Now place the information from those reviews, and from the letters and journals, in the context of the biographical information you have discovered. Are there important relations you should notice?

If you were doing that bigger project, I mentioned at the top of the page, you would next want to look at whether these contemporary reviews were influential on later readers and critics. You'd want to see if recent criticism mirrors those reviews in any way. You'd also want to investigate how the progress of criticism on a particular text varied over time. But we'll leave those questions for another class.

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