30 Great Myths about the Romantics

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