English Poetry 1579-1830: The Spenserian Tradition in Hypertext

English Poetry 1579-1830: The Spenserian Tradition in
Hypertext

David
Hill
Radcliffe
Department of English Virginia Tech
drad@vt.edu

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

English Poetry 1579-1830: The Spenserian Tradition is an
interactive database consisting of over 3000 poems and essays supplemented by
6000 author biographies, anecdotes, and critical remarks drawn from pre-1900
publications. Readers can find information on over 800 writers who imitated or
criticized Spenser in the era when literature in English was constituted as
"English Literature." The project includes imitations of Spenser's poems,
imitations of those imitations, poems written in Spenserian stanzas and
variants, and poems that mention Spenser. Since most ambitious poets and critics
are on record about Spenser, the database contains biographies and critical
remarks about the majority of writers in the present literary canon. But it also
includes much ephemeral and topical material--periodical verse, school
exercises, patronage poems--so that researchers can examine the literary system
more broadly conceived, including hundreds of figures omitted in conventional
anthologies, literary histories, and reference books.
Users can select records by keywords, genre, topic, bibliographic, or demographic
criteria, and by personal associations. Once records are marked, users can
compile bibliographies, display quantitative data on time lines, and tabulate
demographic information according to a variety of specifications. One can look
at what a given writer has to say about other writers in the database, and what
other writers have to say about a given poet or critic. The project is scripted
so that textual and biographical links can be made "on the fly," allowing users
considerable flexibility in translating historical into hypertextual links.