Exploring General Sources for Literary Study (Assignment)

My students are practicing writing literary criticism, and doing so is going to require the ability to do different kinds of research, to draw on different types of sources, as they interpret and make claims about literature.

Too many students hurry along into literary databases finding scholarly criticism of their texts. Such sources are indeed important and appropriate, but they aren't always the best to consult first. So, I'm having my students do an assignment in which they can come to understand what a general literary source is, how that differs from scholarly literary criticism, and in which they can practice finding and applying these introductory sources. They'll write up this as a blog post. Here's what I want them to do:

1. Read this blog post "Brazen serpents for Students of Literature (General Sources for Literary Study)" and familiarize yourself with the five different types of "brazen serpents" (general sources for literary study) outlined there.
2. Consult this list showing which of those five types is assigned to you.
3. Use the specific resources listed under that type, or find others that are similar to look up general information about the same text (our common assigned literary work, Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias")
4. Create a blog post 
1. Title this "General Literary Resources - [type] - [student name]" (see example below);
2. Introduce an annotated list of 2 sources with a short paragraph in which you talk about what you are doing and briefly describe the type of source being researched. 
3. Make a list of two items, with each item an example of one of the types assigned to you. Each item in the list should include 
1. the resource name (and if possible, link) and an annotation that
2. description, if not obvious
3. something found in that source that helps to illuminate our common assigned literary work; 
4. (optional) something about one's process of finding/using the resource
5. (optional) one's brief assessment of the value of that resource
   [Don't number these components. Put it all into one paragraph annotation, as the example shows below]
4. Follow the annotated with a short paragraph in which you speculate on the types of analyses or claims one might make about our common text based on the sources explored. 2-3 sentences, max (see example below)
5. Use the labels #general literary source as well as #posted by [your name]

EXAMPLE
[If the common text to be studied were Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, The Pirates of Penzance]

General Literary Resources - Genre Reference Works - Gideon Burton

My task is to find a specific type of resource to help in my study of Gilbert and Sullivan's famous operetta, The Pirates of Penzance. I'm to find genre reference works. The idea is that if I know more about what the genre of this literature is, I can talk about this operetta more meaningfully. Here's what I found:

• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance
  This resource, which I found by doing a general search of Oxford reference works through my academic library's site, includes an article about the operetta that provides a definition and short history of the form. This little, comic opera format flourished just in the late 19th century, and Gilbert and Sullivan's works are considered high points in the English tradition. The form was only popular during a transition time to the modern age, and interestingly the article states that the operetta "provided the perfect antidotal entertainment for a society experiencing anxiety over modernization." This is a great reference for putting Pirates of Penzance into its peculiar genre and into literary history, and it devotes a solid paragraph just to Gilbert and Sullivan. This entry made me want to look up the other operettas outside of Gilbert and Sullivan, and to go watch the Kevin Kline film and sing along to it again!
• Operetta by Richard Traubner (1983)
  This is apparently the definitive history of the operetta form. How did I find it? Well, I searched for anything related to reference works about the genre of the operetta, and this took me to the Fordham libraries' "Guide for the Study of Operetta" (looked SUPER relevant), and this listed the Traubner book and described its importance. The book was available through BYU's ebook central, so I browsed it. It covers the major authors/composers and gives a good sense of the span of time in which they were all the rage (1860s-1920s), and the setting of popular theater in which operetta's flourished. These words from the introduction give a good sense of the form: "Flowing champagne, ceaseless waltzing, risqué couplets, Graustarkian uniforms and glittering ballgowns, romancing and dancing! Gaiety and lightheartedness, sentiment and Schmalz" (viii). It talks about the operetta as the precursor to modern broadway, with a strong emphasis on the playfulness of language and theatrically humorous actor-singers.

Well, it certainly did not take long to find plenty on this unique genre. It's obvious that one could use it to help do comparisons between Pirates of Penzance and other operettas, or between that and modern musicals. Because this form was so tied to the gilded age and the time of transition around WWI, it would be curious to try to account for the longevity of Gilbert and Sullivan given how suddenly the general trend stopped.