The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805)
Marmion (1808)
The Lady of the Lake (1810)
The Bridal of Triermain (1813)
Rokeby (1813)
Harold the Dauntless (1817)
You will then produce a scholarly edition of your assigned text. Your individual contribution to this group task will constitute 20% of your overall mark for this course.
The final deadline for task completion is Friday 25th March 2011. However, groups should be working on the project over the course of the two terms, meeting fortnightly to work on the task in the alternate, non-seminar weeks of term.
You will not submit hard-copy of your edition; it will be submitted as a word or .rtf file.
Assessment will be based upon this submission, as a group mark; and it will be subject to a 10% individuation, based upon the short personal reflection all of you will submit alongside the edition. We may also take things like the Group Log into account when individuating your mark.
Your edition WILL include:
- An introduction
- The text of the poem itself
- Explanatory notes
- A bibliography of relevant critical material
That is to say: your work will be penalised if it fails to include any of those four things. But because this component of the course is in part a test of your critical initiative, we are not going to specify the requirements of a good edition beyond this point. You should look at scholarly and critical editions of comparable texts to see what makes a good edition. You will be assessed upon the extent to which your edition makes its text readily comprehensible to a 21st-century audience, as well as the extent to which it contextualises and illuminates the work. You are not expected to provide detailed textual analysis of variants between MSS, first and subsequent editions (which is to say: you are not expected to produce a full variorum edition). Your aim should be explanatory in the first instance, and interpretive in the second: precisely, the annotation should be explanatory, and the introduction explanatory and interpretive criticism.
To say a little more about this: you MAY wish to divide your introduction as follows (but you are not obliged to do so).
- Introductory remarks, including a brief account of the poem.
- Biographical and historical context of the poem.
- Literary influences upon the poem.
- Immediate critical reaction, and longer term influence.
- Critical or analytical reading of the poem.
You may, however, decide that a different structure for your introduction would work better.
The text can be otherwise simply downloaded from one of the many internet resources that contain Scott's poems, but must be clean (ie free from typos and misprints). You may wish to divide the cantos of your poem amongst your group to check this. Whilst you are not expected to produce detailed textual criticism, you may if you wish discuss any substantive textual cruces in the notes.
The notes should seek to be explanatory (by which I mean: whilst you are actively encouraged to develop your own critical interpretation of the poem, you should do this in the introduction, not the notes). Two further things about annotation: (1) Your notes should gloss any unusual or obscure vocabulary; but do not define words that are found in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. You can assume your imaginary reader has a copy of that to hand. (2) You will find that Scott himself added notes to his own texts. These should be incorporated in your editions, in the footnotes, and, if you wish, discussed; although you may find that they are self-explanatory.
A few more things you MAY (but are not obliged to) include:
- Illustrations. For example: 5 out of the 6 poems have medieval or post-medieval settings: you may wish to discuss this aspect of them in your introduction with reference to other contemporary medieval cultural discourse, such as paintings and illustrations;
- Appendices. For example including other relevant texts, published letters or poems on similar topics, provided these are not too long.
- A Chronology of Scott's life.
- Maps, diagrams and the like -- if they are liable to illuminate the text.
There is no word limit for this project. The notes should be as long as the text requires; and whilst it will be in your interest to limit the length of the introduction to make it manageable, you should be guided by the needs of the project rather than any artificial limit. That said we are offering you some suggested word limits, as guidance, and for those who would like it. The critical introduction should be at least 2000-2500 words
The word limit for the personal reflection is 750.
Publication. Our aim is for these editions to be e-published, under your names and no others, possibly in an annex to the departmental web page. The idea would be to make them available to the worlds of scholarship and education as a useful and stimulating resource. Of course, this will depend upon several things, though; one of which is the standard of submitted work. It will also depend upon you: the texts themselves are long out of copyright, but you will hold the copyright on the introduction and notes you write, such that any future publication will depend upon your permission. We will discuss this at greater length next term.
One final note on plagiary, about which I'm sure you don't need reminding. You'll find that there are several editions of Scott's poetry in the library with introductions and footnotes; and even some of the internet links I give above open with a brief introduction. DO NOT PLAGIARISE THESE, OR ANYTHING ELSE, WHEN WRITING YOUR OWN INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES. You may draw on other editions of Scott as a research resource, and even quote them, provided you attribute the work correctly. We always take a dim view of plagiary, but for a project like this -- where it would hypothetically be possible to cut and paste intro, text and notes all from the internet -- we will be extra vigilant.
