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[synois]

i'm captivated by the swag of your icon. where is it from?

Hiii it's costume design ideas for stephen tennant as percy shelley by rex whistler! They're absolutely gorgeous. Here are the two designs rex made:

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the fact that mary shelley was supposed to be on the boat with percy when he drowned but at the last minute she didn’t go because she still didn’t feel well enough due to a miscarriage which almost killed her a month earlier except he saved her life… and that she later believed she was meant to live to raise their child (who was named after percy!!!)… the amount of dramatic details surrounding their lives blow my mind… how were they even real!!!!!!

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Fucking brilliant strategy tbh

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Someone: Hi-

Me: Have you seen Spider Verse

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If you want to get the chance to hear all of these, check out my Patreon, where they'll see everything first! If you sub to it, you're basically buying me a coffee while I work on making this musical happen. :)

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Miles Morales Kilometres Morales

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I swear if Hobie and Spider-Man India don't get more screen time in the next movie than it's all for nothing

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“I am writing to you on the terrace of a tiny old castle parched above the sea. The castle turns pink in the sunset, the sea sparkles three hundred foot below. A large bottle of golden wine stands at my elbow. I write and write and write,–”

— Vita Sackville-West, from a letter to Virginia Woolf wr. c. February 1933

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I love the Romantics (esp 2nd gen) and was wondering where you learn more about them outside an academic setting?

I am by no means an expert, but I will try to answer by using stuff that has helped me!

For books, I highly recommend Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives by Daisy Hay as an introduction. My only complaint is that it leaves out a ton of entertaining stuff imo, but it’s meant to be brief. It isn’t available for free anywhere afaik, but it’s very worth buying. It gives an overview of the movement & explains how all the key figures are interrelated in a very clever way. For biographies imo the best on Byron is Byron: a Portrait by Marchand, most agree the best on Shelley is Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes, most agree the best on Mary is Miranda Seymour’s Mary Shelley, & the best on Keats is (more arguably?) John Keats by Walter Jackson Bates. For critical analysis on the works, it’s best to research on a case-by-case basis (there are literally thousands of books & papers analyzing Frankenstein… I shudder to think of attempting to read even half of them).

The link below is a fantastic resource list by Dr. Anna Mercer who is an important Romanticist. She wrote a work called The Collaborative Literary Relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2019) which is also one of my favorites & I highly highly recommend it as well. https://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=2900

Other good resource guides: 1 University of Texas at Arlingtonhttps://libguides.uta.edu › romanticRomantic Literature: Internet Resources 2 https://jacklynch.net/Lit/romantic.html 3 https://libguides.uta.edhttps://pitt.libguides.com/romanticliterature/journalsanddatabasesu/romantic 4 https://guides.library.queensu.ca/engl340/websites

Having access to databases and libraries really helps, but those are academic (unless you have a public library—if so, pls use it). If I’m researching a broad topic I sometimes start through Wikipedia & go from there, searching for what information I need by “phrase searching” on Google.

IMPORTANT ADVICE: this will all feel very overwhelming and confusing at first! I highly suggest just picking a work or a writer, finding something that really interests you, then learn more about it/them if you’d like, & just continue from there as a starting point. For me: I knew a *little* about these writers, and I’ve always loved Frankenstein, but I didn’t start any heavy Romantic research until I read Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron, specifically Canto III, which is considered one of his best works and one of the key Romantic works in general. It really shook me to my core. I believe I discovered it from the Wikipedia page on the “Byronic Hero” concept (which stemmed from Childe Harold). I really just went down the rabbit hole from there… and I don’t know how I got here…

Good luck on your journey, and thx for the ask!

Btw — despite being an English Lit major, I haven’t actually studied Romanticism in any of my classes sadly! I just haven’t had the opportunity or it hasn’t come up; my program is mainly based on modern topics though, and so most of us only get to take a few historical classes. But my research on this has been independent. The first gen Romantics have been briefly discussed in one or two of my classes, and Frankenstein has featured in a lot of my classes, but that’s in a league of it’s own really—it’s one of the very few classic novels that most Americans are familiar with tbh!

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Robert Doisneau. Le Génie de la Bastille, Paris, c.1959.

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Orpheus tries to hold on to Eurydice

.c. 1791

Artist : François Gérard (1770-1837)

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meanwhile at the villa diodati on lake geneva in the cold stormy summer of 1816

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Low quality Romanticism memes.

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Entering my twenties like John Keats

[crippling financial anxiety, hesitantly changing my career path multiple times, slowly dying of consumption, feeling unaccomplished and like nothing I ever do is good enoug-

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omfg

Are you a hedonistic bastard pansexual who is obsessed with post apocalyptic nonsense and writes bad poetry?

Are you a theatre kid who just turned 18 who has a crush on some awesome celebrity who may actually turn out to be a complete asshole?

Are you a gay asexual med student with a thing for vampires who’s been working on a novel for shut up many years?

Are you a sleep deprived goth girl with a frankly unhealthy fascination with science?

Are you a bisexual soft boy who writes fairly decent poetry and is obsessed with your girlfriend and may have a few children somewhere on the west coast?

Then you should consider supporting my Patreon for like $1 a month or something, bc I’ve written (that’s right, past tense, workshopping now!) a musical about these five characters (Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, John Polidori, and Mary and Percy Shelley, respectively) and the summer when they all got high and wrote a bunch of ghost stories, including the original modern vampire story and motherfucking FRANKENSTEIN.

By supporting my Patreon, you’ll be able to get a good view of the entire process of the creation of this musical from the very freaking start, including pictures, videos, and music from the show as it’s being workshopped, and eventually, a full recording of the show!! And you’ll also get to know that you’re helping me, an independent creator, achieve something great, a childhood dream… by ensuring that I don’t have to survive on beans and rice, and can afford the coffee/gas necessary to do all the work associated with creating a whole freaking musical. 

So yeah, please consider becoming a patron. This isn’t a typical path for a composer; I want to do something that really isn’t done, and show transparency throughout the creation of my work. I can only really do this if I have the resources, and that relies on support from folks like you. 

If you can’t support my Patreon for whatever reason, then please reblog this post instead. Maybe one of your followers can, and that would make all the difference!

[synois]

and percy shelley is a bysshe

lord byron? more like lord biron, am i right?