The Romantic age in Britain formed one of the most celebrated--and heterogeneous--moments in literary history, but it also witnessed the rise of "political economy" as the pre-eminent nineteenth-century science of society. Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture' investigates this historical conjunction, and reassesses the idea that the Romantic defense of spiritual and humanistic "culture" developed as a reaction to the individualistic, philistine values of the "dismal science."
Drawing on a wide range of source material, the book combines the methods of literary scholarship...