This wide-ranging book explores the generic innovations that drive the Romantic 'revolution in literature', but also the fascination with archaic forms such as the ballad, sonnet, epic, and romance, whose revival and transformation make Romanticism a 'retro' as well as a revolutionary movement.
Anyone interested in a careful and fair-minded assessment of neoclassical genre criticism and the intellectual heirs and rebels it produced would do well to consult this book; and even scholars familiar with the field might make surprising discoveries about texts or interconnections they had not previously considered.
