In his study, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (2009), David Duff systematically investigates the ways in which writers and theorists of Romanticism in Britain effectively and productively engaged with the issue of genres and their literary tradition as it had been established in the Western cultural scene by the end of the eighteenth century.

The findings of his research clearly and vividly show that Romanticism in Britain did not overturn the concept of genre, but rather redefined it radically within its new original literary, artistic, aesthetic, and philosophical horizon, where there prevailed a synthetic mixture of established generic categories and their reorientation into radically innovative literary, theoretical, and critical realizations, as evidenced in the works of emblematic Romantic poets: William Blake, S. T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, P. B. Shelley, and John Keats.

Contents

• Image Index
• Foreword
• Editor's Introduction
• Introduction
• The Old Imperial Code
• The Genre Theory of Romanticism (Anti-) Didacticism
• Archaism and Renewal
• The Combined Method
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Selected Bibliography
• Index