30 Great Myths about the Romantics
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Brimming with the fascinating eccentricities of a complex and confusing movement whose influences continue to resonate deeply, 30 Great Myths About the Romantics adds great clarity to what we know – or think we know – about one of the most important periods in literary history.
- Explores the various misconceptions commonly associated with Romanticism, offering provocative insights that correct and clarify several of the commonly-held myths about the key figures of this era
- Corrects some of the biases and beliefs about the Romantics that have crept into the 21st-century zeitgeist – for example that they were a bunch of drug-addled atheists who believed in free love; that Blake was a madman; and that Wordsworth slept with his sister
- Celebrates several of the mythic objects, characters, and ideas that have passed down from the Romantics into contemporary culture – from Blake’s Jerusalem and Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn to the literary genre of the vampire
- Engagingly written to provide readers with a fun yet scholarly introduction to Romanticism and key writers of the period, applying the most up-to-date scholarship to the series of myths that continue to shape our appreciation of their work
Duncan Wu is Professor of English at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He is the editor of Romanticism: An Anthology, 4th edition (WileyBlackwell, 2012), and the author of books about Romanticism, Wordsworth, and Hazlitt.