The Prelude is now seen as a central text in the Wordsworth corpus. This Guide identifies and gathers significant critical perspectives, interpretations and debates connected with the poem, contextualising and explaining criticism from the Victorian period right through to the present day.

How have our conceptions of truth been shaped by romantic literature? This question lies at the heart of this examination of the concept of truth both in romantic writing and in modern criticism. The romantic idea of truth has long been depicted as aesthetic, imaginative, and ideal. Tim Milnes challenges this picture, demonstrating a pragmatic strain in the writing of Keats, Shelley and Coleridge in particular, that bears a close resemblance to the theories of modern pragmatist thinkers such as Donald Davidson and Jurgen Habermas. Romantic pragmatism, Milnes argues, was in turn influenced by...