Romantics Rebels & Reactionaries

This highly influential study takes a fresh look at one of the most fertile periods in English literature, a period wich produced writers such as Blake, Keats, Coleridge, and Austen. Marilyn Butler shows that one of the most dynamic and stressful periods of modern history fostered a literature that was itself various and contradictory. The Age of Revolutions and its aftermath is unparalleled in English literature. Its poets include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; its novelists, Jane Austen and Scott. But how is it that some of these writers were apparently swept up in Romanticism, and others not? Studies of Romanticism have tended to adopt the Romantic viewpoint. They value creativity, imagination and originality - ideas which nineteenth-century writers themselves used to promote a new image of their calling. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries puts the movement in to its historical setting and provides a new insight in Romanticism itself, showing that one of the most dynamic and stressful periods of modern times fostered a literature that was itself various and contradictory.