Romantic Returns explores the theorization and operation of -imagination- in pre-romantic and romantic writing. Drawing on the poetry and prose of William Collins, William Hazlitt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, it shows the continuing importance of their understanding of imagination for contemporary debates about the historicity of literature. Historicist readings of romanticism have done much to establish how and why romantic aesthetics is ideological--an illusory if effective evasion of its material conditions. Romantic Returns challenges this position by arguing that romantic...