This wide-ranging reappraisal of the role of genre in British Romanticism 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.
This wide-ranging book explores the generic innovations that propel the Romantic 'revolution in literature', but also the fascination with archaic forms such as the ballad, sonnet, epic, and romance. It shows how the tension between the drives to 'make it old' and 'make it new' generates one of the most dynamic phases in the history of literature, whose complications are played out in the critical theory of the period as well as its poetry, prose and drama.
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.
