Introduction

Abstract

Romanticism is in a constant state of flux. For a good twenty years, it has been undergoing regular adjustments: re-visionings, re-evaluations, re-statings, re-workings. Many critical studies open by making the claim for novelty and new visions. What is most interesting about the regular claims to innovation, however, is how much actually stays the same. Books tend still to discuss the usual figures: the familiar six in poetry, an increasing number for prose but nearly always including, for instance, Godwin, Scott, de Quincy, Hazlitt: the familiar essayists and fiction writers. Or they are self-consciously going off piste, covering the still not fully mapped terrain of the huge and growing numbers of women writers, in both poetry and prose (but mainly prose) of the period. The two segments don’t seem, very often, to overlap; that is, books about the male writers may put forward theories useful to authors of books about female writers, but there is not a lot of traffic the other way. For some reason, arguments about specific male writers can be applied more generally across the field, while arguments about the group “women writers,” as well as individual authors, remain useful only for that ring-fenced specialism. Many books still rely on a familiar set of assumptions about the period: divisions into “high” and “low” Romanticism, or discussions of first and second generations, or a gendering of genre (women mainly wrote novels, men mainly wrote poetry and politics). And, of course, the Habermasian separate spheres are still pretty rigidly assumed, as well.