I mentioned last time that the 4th edition of NAEL offered a different beginning date for Romanticism (1798 as opposed to 1785). One obvious implication of this: PERIODS ARE CONCEPTS, not objective factual conditions, although they may be, to some degree, concepts about objective factual conditions. Who you call a Romantic depends on what you think Romanticism is--and, just to show how circular and arbitrary this can get, what you think Romanticism is depends on who you think is a Romantic.
So what changed? Well, another thing to notice about the 4th edition is that the only women represented in the Romantics section were Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Dorothy Wordsworth. So one thing that changed is that critics started asking, weren't there any female poets in the Romantic era who weren't relatives of famous male poets? And the answer turned out to be yes; in fact, many of the most popular poets of the day were female: Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld, Felicia Hemans, Mary Robinson, etc.
When you start adding lots of new poets to the canon, however, you pretty quickly have to start rethinking the canon. To be clear, I'm not saying that the addition of female poets was the only element of this rethinking--we'll meet another category-buster later in the course. But 1798 doesn't look like a privileged date when the existence of Romantic-ish poets writing before Wordsworth and Coleridge make you stop saying to yourself, "Wordsworth and Coleridge brought Romantic poetry into being with Lyrical Ballads." One effect of this rethinking was to push the starting date of the Romantic era back to a somewhat arbirtrary date of 1785 (for reasons you can read about in the Norton intro to Romanticism).
What I'd like us to do today, in addition to just trying to understand Barbauld's poetry better, is to get ourselves actively involved in this question of what a literary period is and how you plug people into it.
For today you get to be the editors of NAEL. And let's suppose that you've just discovered Anna Letitia Barbauld, and you've been convinced that she belongs in the NAEL, i.e she's good enough to be considered canonical. Where do you put her? In the Neoclassical period or the Romantic? And let's further suppose that dates aren't going to help you--she's older than Wordsworth, but she lived well into the Romantic age. So you have to make this decision based upon the qualities of her poetry, as best you understand it, and the qualities of Neoclassical and Romantic poetry, as you understand them.
To help with this, I'm providing a crib sheet. As much as possible, I've taken this or inferred it from the NAEL introductions, so these are what you have to live up to.
(Acknowledgement: this is a highly artificial exercise in lots of ways, not the least of which is that if you were a real editor with such a decision you would be trying to figure out whether Barbauld is a LATE 18th C poet or a Romantic poet, not an Augustan Age poet, and we haven't covered the late 18th C yet. Oh well.)
How we'll proceed: we'll count off by threes; each number will be associated with a different Barbauld poem (1 = "Summer Evening's Meditation," 2 = "Rights of Woman," 3 = "Washing-Day"). These groups will meet for 10 minutes or so for you to look over your poems. The questions you're trying to address: 1) what are the features of this poem that are neo-classical? 2) what are the features that are romantic? and 3) putting them all together, is this a neoclassical or a romantic poem? We'll then put you back in your regular seats and split the class in half, so that each group will have at least one person representing each poem. Your job then will be to decide which period Barbauld belongs in and precisely why. We'll come back together at the end to share the results.