Simon C. Edgett
This unit will be presented in a twelfth-grade honors British Literature class. Prior to this unit of study, students will have completed a survey of the major periods of British Literature leading up to the Romantic period: Anglo-Saxon, Medieval, Renaissance, and Neo-Classical. Historical perspective will be a major component of study in each of these literary periods.
While the lessons are being written with an honors level class in mind, I feel an adaptation of the unit for lower level students is easily accomplished by providing further scaffolding through modeling text annotations, modifications such as shorter poems, and more time in class for research, reading, and group analysis.
Students will have also completed a portion of study on the Romantic period including both an introduction to the key characteristics of the period and an analysis of works by some of the earlier writers of the period, including the prose writings of Burke, Paine, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft, and the poetic writings of Wordsworth and Coleridge. These readings will provide students with an understanding of the historical, philosophical, and artistic underpinnings of the period and provide a background from which their more focused study of the Shelleys will draw.