Romantic Circles is a refereed scholarly Website devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture. It is the collaborative product of an ever-expanding community of editors, contributors, and users around the world, overseen by a distinguished Advisory Board.
Romantic Circles is currently serving approximately 700 thousand pages each year to users in over 190 countries around the world.
The site is divided into several main sections:- “Electronic Editions” features new volumes of edited Romantic-era texts along with commentary and annotation by leading contemporary scholars in the field.
- “Praxis Series” features peer-reviewed volumes of literary criticism.
- “Scholarly Resources” contains research tools including bibliographies, indexes and concordances, chronologies, and other miscellaneous resources.
- “Pedagogies” contains a pedagogical blog, online syllabi, and “Romantic Pedagogy Commons,” a peer-reviewed journal devoted to teaching Romanticism.
- “The Gallery” features a curated collection of Romantic-era images.
- “Audio” contains a collection of audio files including interviews, readings, and lectures. This section also includes Poets on Poets, which contains recording of practicing poets from around the world reading a Romantic-period poem.
- “RC Unbound” is a periodical public-facing publication; each issue features a sheaf of fugitive posts on urgent issues and events.
- “Reviews & Receptions” contains reviews of current Romantic scholarship and contemporary engagements with Romantic-era literature, art, and culture.
Policies and Guidelines
Please review our Conditions of Use Statement for information on the re-publication or other use of Romantic Circles resources. Information on submissions can be found on our Editorial and Publication Policies Page. To properly cite the resources on this site, consult our Guidelines for Electronic Citation Page.
History and Archives
A chronological record of the editors and editorial structure of Romantic Circles appears on our History Page. Discontinued sections and pages at Romantic Circles are listed on, and can be accessed from, our Archives page.
Accolades
Among various forms of honors and recognition, Romantic Circles was selected in 1997 by the NEH, the MCI Foundation, and the Council for Great City Schools as one of the 21 best sites on the Internet for education in the humanities and has been participating since then in the EdSITEment program. It has also been the recipient of a major education development grant from the NEH. In February 2006, the ongoing Poets on Poets series was made a featured site at the prominent Poetry Foundation Web site. More recently, in 2010 The United States Library of Congress has selected Romantic Circles for inclusion in its historic collections of Internet materials.
Scholars and reviewers have had much to say about Romantic Circles.
Technical details
Romantic Circles is powered by Drupal, a free and open source Content Management System (CMS). As of August 2013, the completely revamped site is built on a database infrastructure that allows for greater, more dynamic handling of content, display, users, and metadata than its static html form allowed. By atomizing the site's data and metadata as numerous database fields, the site reveals new possibilities for organizing and understanding the content available on Romantic Circles. Leveraging a suite of core and contributed "modules," the site's functionality has been extended to include features for content recommendation, mapping, streaming audio, site usage statistics, image galleries and slideshows, as well categorized taxonomies that allow users to navigate content in highly customizable ways.
As of April 2011, all new peer-reviewed content has been marked up in TEI-compliant XML, a set of guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. The TEI files are subsequently transformed into HTML using modified versions of XSL transformations provided by the TEI. TEI renders text archival quality for better preservation and future access.