First published in 1981. The primary purpose of this book is to serve as an introduction to writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition to major Romantic poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelly – the authors discuss writers such as Austen, Hazlitt and Burke, who are usually studied in a different context, and genres such as fiction and political writing, which are often cut off from the central body of poetry.

An original and highly stimulated study, this book will appeal to all those who are dissatisfied with the conventional categories into which writers and literary movements are usually placed.