Romanticism (The New Critical Idiom)

Aidan Day considers the history and usage of the term Romanticism, and the changing views and debates which surround it. He traces its history through nineteenth and twentieth-century readings, incorporating contemporary debates such as feminism, post-structuralism and new historicism. Day places the traditional canon in the wider context of their contemporary political and philosophical thinkers. A range of writers, both canonical and non-canonical, are included in his survey, including:

• William Blake
• William Wordsworth
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• John Keats
• Shelley
• Edmund Blake
• Thomas Paine
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Jane Austen
• Charlotte Smith
• Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Romanticism takes a clear, wide-ranging view of the subject and is essential reading for students new to the subject.