Romantic Circles, which helped pioneer collaborative scholarship on the Web, has become the leading paradigm for what such scholarship could be. One can point variously to the excellence of its refereed editions of primary texts, its panoply of critical and pedagogical resources, its inventive Praxis series, its state-of-the-art use of technology or its stirring commitment (nearly unprecedented on the Web) to spanning the gap between high-school and research-level tiers of education. But ultimately, no one excellence is as important as the overall, holistic impact of the site. We witness here a broad community of scholars using the new media vigorously, inventively, and rigorously to inhabit a period of historical literature together. —Alan Liu
There are few online sites as energized or energizing as Romantic Circles. The material here is prepared for a remarkably broad range of students, teachers, and scholars from high school to graduate programs. It is easy to access and use. Most impressive of all are the quality and reliability of the materials provided--the original materials as well as the tools that have been built to make them available. This is online education at its very best done by a small group of educators with a great public conscience. —Jerome McGann
Digital work like Romantic Circles is an enormous resource for scholarship and for being aware of what's going on in Romanticism. The digital environment is also forcing us to rethink what it means to think--and therefore to think about Romanticism. —Ann K. Mellor
Romantic Circles is an excellent example of the thematic research collection--an emerging electronic scholarly genre in which many primary and secondary resources are selected and organized around a theme (Romanticism, in this case). It is also an excellent example of a new kind of scholarly communication and collaboration, in which scholars at many different institutuions pool their expertise—and volunteer their time—to produce a resource of great value not only to a traditional academic audience but also to the general audience that traditional academic work has usually missed. —John Unsworth
Romantic Circles is like a perfect conference--densely populated, full of serendipitous encounters, timely and yet substantial. Its conception of online scholarship is at once generous and rigorous: not that those terms ought to be set at variance, but they too often are. —Julia Flanders
Romanticism is perhaps the best represented literary movement on the Web, and at the forefront of the dozens of excellent sites is the critically acclaimed Romantic Circles. Romantic Circles brings to bear all the advantages research on the Web has to offer; you will find edited electronic versions of works by writers like Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Keats, and Mary Darby Robinson (many of which are previewed separately in Webivore), and the "Praxis Series," an online critical journal with volumes on subjects like "Romanticism and the Law" and "Early Shelley." Each edition has a handful of essays, each with its own search function, and the archive extends back to 1997. Add to these databases a real-time, multi-user interactive environment and you get one of the most dynamic academic sites on the Web. —Review by Searchopolis
Reviews and Articles About Romantic Circles
Broglio, Ron. "Criticism from Inside the Poem: MOOs and Blake's Milton." Text Technology 2 (2004): 83-90.
<http://texttechnology.mcmaster.ca/pdf/vol13_2_05.pdf>
Neil Fraistat, Steven E. Jones, and Carl Stahmer. "The Canon, The Web, and the Digitization of Romanticism." Romanticism On the Net 10 (May 1998).
<http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/1998/v/n10/005801ar.html>
Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones. "The MOO as an Arcade: Minimalism and Interpretive literary Games." Text Technology 2 (2004): 19-26.
<http://texttechnology.mcmaster.ca/pdf/vol13_2_02.pdf>
Joseph Gibaldi, ed. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Sixth edition. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003: 43. [Romantic Circles used as a detailed illustration of "an authoritative source suitable for scholarly research".]
Steven E. Jones. "Digital Romanticism in the Age of Neo-Luddism: the Romantic Circles Experiment." Romanticism on the Net 41-42 (special anniversary issue, Feb.-May, 2006).
<http://www.erudit.org/revue/RON/2006/v/n41-42/013152ar.html>
---. "Net Work in the Virtual Department: The Romantic Circles Experiment." ADE Bulletin 127 (Winter 2001). 51-54.
<http://www.ade.org/bulletin/temp/Jones_article.htm>.
Marlene Manoff. "Cyberhope or Cyberhype?: Computers and Scholarly Research." Canadian Journal of Communication [Online] 22(3) (January 1997).
<http://www.cjc-online.ca/viewarticle.php?id=436>
Marjorie Perloff. "Teaching in the Wired Classroom." MLA Newsletter 38.4 (Winter 2006). 3-5.
Eric Sonstroem. "Do you Really Want a Revolution? CyberTheory Meets Real-Life Pedagogical Practice in FrankenMOO and the Conventional Literature Classroom." College Literature 33.3 (Summer 2006). 148-170.
Brenda H. Walton and Tara Bork. "'Telling Stories Long into the Night': Romantic Circles High School Project." English Journal 91.1 (September 2001). 103-107.