The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation

About this book

Claiming that the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works have for too long been dominated by a Romantic ideologyby an uncritical absorption in Romanticisms own self-representationsJerome 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. Words worth 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.