Romantic Aversions

Often Regarded as a turning point in literary history, Romanticism is the period when writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge renounced the common legacy of poets and sought to create a new literature. Despite their emphasis on originality, genius, and spontaneity, the first-generation Romantics manifested a highly intertextual style that, while repressing certain classical and neoclassical literary conventions, revealed a deep dependence on those same rhetorical practices.

Combining original and close readings of the texts with a larger sweep of genre studies, Douglas Kneale brings to light new and unexpected convergences in the Romantic tradition.