Romantic Misfits

Perhaps the most significant event of the Romantic period was the explosion in print media. In an age of personality, writers strove for attention by dramatising their status as a 'neglected genius', someone who wrote, not for the mass-market or for profit, but for the discerning few. 'Romantic misfit' is the common term for this modern identity. However, where all Romantics are misfits, some misfits did not fit. Romantic Misfits, now in paperback for the first time with a new Preface, probes the modern institutionalisation of Literature by examining this process of inclusion and exclusion as it happened among first generation Romantics, where the tension between the late Enlightenment and its Romantic 'counter' was at its most acute. A recurring theme of Romantic Misfits is that Romanticism was institutionalised among the ruins of the public sphere, and that civic engagement was a casualty of the transcendental aesthetics that arose to buttress a new, exclusive conception of Literature.

ROBERT MILES is Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Canada.