The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation

First printing. Volume, measuring approximately 6" x 9", is bound in green cloth, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Book is in fine condition, with firm binding, clean and bright pages. Previous owner's name appears on front flyleaf. Dust jacket displays minor loss at top of rear panel. ix/172 pages.

"Claiming that the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works have for too long been dominated by a Romantic ideology—by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations—Jerome J. McGann presents a new, critical view of the subject that calls for a radically revisionary reading of Romanticism. In the course of his study, McGann analyzes both the predominant theories of Romanticism (those deriving from Coleridge, Hegel, and Heine) and the products of its major English practitioners. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron are considered in greatest depth, but the entire movement is subjected to a searching critique. Arguing that poetry is produced and reproduced within concrete historical contexts and that criticism must take these contexts into account, McGann shows how the ideologies embodied in Romantic poetry and theory have shaped and distorted contemporary critical activities."