Claiming that the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works have for too long been dominated by a Romantic ideology by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations Jerome J. McGann presents a new, "critical" view of the subject that calls for a radically revisionary reading of Romanticism.
In the course of his study, McGann analyzes both the predominant theories of Romanticism (those deriving from Coleridge, Hegel, and Heine) and the products of its major English practitioners. Words worth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron are considered in greatest depth,...