Romanticism

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.