Romanticism is a doomed tradition, yet a perpetually self-renewing one. The novel, Disgrace's central character, David Lurie, is an academic, a literary scholar, a Romanticist, in fact. Coetzee develops an interpretation of European Romanticism. His book is thus in great measure a satiric investigation of a wide range of Romantic ideologies, from Wordsworthian sincerity, on one end, to Byronic intellectual flamboyance on the other. If Romanticism is perpetually 'doomed' and perpetually 'self-renewing', those reciprocities draw on a common energy source: imaginative scepticism. Hemans poem locates not a sceptical deficiency but the exact form of Hemans's Romanticism. 'Byron' and 'The Sceptic' are magical mirrors giving Hemans access to that dreadful Christian situation within which Hemans's special Romanticism exfoliates: the Romanticism of maternal fear and anxiety. Romantic works flourish all about us in popular and highbrow art, music, and writing.

The Regency is one of the few periods of British history to survive in popular memory. Regency London endures in cultural transformations because this is a period of in-betweenness in British history. At a national level, the new statistical modes of analysis uncovered accurate information about the city for the first time. A more traditional London appeared through the fashion for watercolours, which reached its height around 1810 when 20,000 visitors attended the Watercolour Society's annual exhibition. The most important components of London's variegated cultural market were journalism, drama, literature, art, shows, lectures and sport. London street life, marked by ceremonies and often by importunate demands for payment from the poor to the more comfortable, remained vital during the first decades of the century. Journalism and the theatre lay at the centre of the London cultural market. Regency journalism was fluid: periodicals opened and closed with bewildering speed, many only producing a few issues.

The period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, familiar to students of literature as the age of Romanticism, has been named by some historians of science 'the second Scientific Revolution'. This chapter explores the transformation of Enlightenment public science into the more extensive but more fragmented enterprise of the early nineteenth century. It examines the several themes that featured centrally in scientific discourse of the period. Wariness and suspicion undermined the ideals of enlightened public science, of which Priestley had been the best-known spokesman. From the crucible of the 1790s, new forms of public science emerged. The cultivation of a sense of the sublimity of nature provided an aesthetic basis for communicating scientific discoveries to a broad public audience. Central to the new relationship between the sciences and their public audience was a new image of the man of science: the scientific hero.

John Stuart Mill, in his essays on Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, observes that 'these two men', though 'they agreed in being closet-students'. Mill's account helps to bring out certain similarities in their projects. Both were crucial participants in a massive change in the understanding of representation that occurred within their lives and those of their Romantic contemporaries. The various different kinds of attention to representation, essayistic evaluation, the contribution of acceptance by an audience, and detailed analysis of the differences between one use of language and another, help to indicate the extent to which the Romantics restructured representation. Didacticism, conceived as the effort to promulgate particular beliefs in literary works, came to seem less like an unpleasant option and more like an unavailable one. While Bentham sought to evaluate individual actions in relation to systematic social action, Shelley repeatedly described poetry as lending 'systematic form' to social imagination.

Discarding the 'classical' theory of genre, Friedrich Schlegel wrote provocatively that there is only one genre or as many genres as texts. The cultural discipline subtended by the system of genres was in flux by the Romantic period. This chapter focuses on three generic radicals that are distributed across the formal divisions between prose, poetry and non-fiction prose: extensive genres; intensive genres; and genres-in-progress. The word genre is also connected to 'gender' and 'engendering'. In this period 'epigenesis' gradually replaced 'preformation' as an account of how organisms develop. Epigenesis, as a result, became an account not just of how an organism develops but also of the emergence of new species. The impact of the development of the embryo is evident in Hegel, who worked on both natural history and art. The novelizing other extensive genres allows poetry to be removed from its current esotericism and seen as producing the novel.

Walsingham's presence in the fashionable setting gives Robinson a pretext for putting fashion on trial and for assessing, in particular, how the smart set discuss novels. Robinson's virtuous characters have been obliged to vindicate modern books, contemporary novels particularly. Encountering Walsingham's vindication of the Enlightenment purveyed by contemporary writing, one might be persuaded that the novelist was the instrument through which modernity had been and would be made. Entrepreneurs such as James Harrison encouraged their clients to consider their library acquisitions as cultural capital, badges of their refinement and upward social mobility. It was left to the period's Gothic fictions to develop the repertory of stock situations that thereafter would betoken the horrors of reiteration. Otranto and its successors demonstrate how Gothic romance served Romantic-period culture as a site for exploring the more troubling implications of the eighteenth century's invention of the vernacular literary canon.

To witness the reconfiguration of Great Britain into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Joseph Johnson published an anonymous novel titled Castle Rackrent. Morgan represents the way that early nineteenth-century women writers helped to redefine the place of fiction in public discourse and highlighted its active role in the formation of the modern nation. The domestic novels and national tales opened up speculative spaces even as they continued to work inside the political terms of national settlement. Reinventing historical romance as the modern historical novel in Waverley, Walter Scott explicitly built out of the work of female writers from the peripheries, naming Edgeworth, Hamilton and Anne Grant as predecessors in the postscript to his first novel. The Waverley Novels fused romance, theory and scholarship into a potent new narrative synthesis that for the first time articulated a fully historicist vision in fiction.

In the absence of 'rational books' designed for children, pupils at Christ's Hospital read chapbooks during recreation hours. For Scargill's schoolboys, chapbooks function rather as social glue, counterbalancing a curriculum of rote memorization and Latin recitation. Romantic writers belonged to the first generations raised on Newbery's books and the self-consciously literary, book-centred and commercial forms of children's writing Newbery inaugurated. Newbery's The Fairing offers highly assorted literary fare: poems, nursery rhymes, cautionary tales, song lyrics, allusions to Henry Fielding, Shakespeare, Edward Young and other Newbery books. An anonymous 1820 London Magazine essay, 'The Literature of the Nursery' echoes Lamb's lament. In the early nineteenth century, the renewed commercialization of children's literature created new anxieties about the propriety of juvenile reading and the status of the book as personal property. Romantic children's literature idealizes mothers, nurses and school-mistresses as agents of literacy. Other Romantic children's books postulated deferral as the precondition, price and psychic reward of literacy.

Wordsworth went so far as to equate 'all good poetry' with 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'. Lord Byron signatures were legibly classical: dramas set in the old unities of time, place and action; poetry, hewing to traditions of craft. In the poetics of sympathy, the genres turned inward. A poetry of gaps and indirections, of understatements and silences, required a new mode of reading, even a revolution of the kind that Jeffrey's impatience with the Ode intuited but was in no mood of mind to theorize. While Byron was working his new discoveries at home and then abroad, in 1817 a new periodical, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, launched a serial assault on a new London-suburbanism: 'The Cockney School of Poetry'. If the stories today credit its new poetries with a generative role in the history of English Literature, the old stories keep us alert to what Romantic-era poets and their readers knew, and knew not, as 'new'.