British and Romantic Victorian Cultures

ROBERT MILES is Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Canada.
Robert Miles Palgrave Macmillan
An acute and searching account of a linked sequence of authors and literary episodes that centrally challenges and troubles much that is familiar about the Romantic Misfits is an acute and searching account of a linked sequence of authors and literary episodes that centrally challenges and troubles much that is familiar about the history of Romantic writing in Britain. Its originality lies in the way it conceives these false starts and disturbances - 'misfits' and misfittings - as both a constitutive challenge to canonical romanticism and a distinctive literary field worth examining on its own account. Its misfits include the Shakespeare forger W.H. Ireland, Wordsworth's early gothic, Coleridge's material imagination, the novel itself, and the culture of Dissent.

The Original Misfit: The Shakespeare Forgeries, Herbert Croft's Love and Madness and W.H. Ireland's Romantic Career * Trouble in the Republic of Letters: The Reception of the Shakespeare Forgeries * Gothic Wordsworth * The Romantic Abject: Cagliostro, Carlyle, Coleridge * The Philosophical Romance * Dissenting Misfits: Barbauld and Montgomery