Dr John Gilroy (BA Newcastle: MPhil Warwick: Cert.Ed. Leeds) lectures part-time in the English Department of Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. He is a lecturer for the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education and is a course director for its international and residential programmes. His most recent publications are contributions on Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats for The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature (Steven R. Serafin & Valerie Grosvenor-Myer eds, Continuum, 2003), Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selected Poems, 2007 ([...] and Philip Larkin: Selected Poems, 2009 ([...] He is interested in all aspects of British Romanticism and is currently researching material on the significance of early aeronautics in the Romantic period.

Part One: Introduction

Part Two: A Cultural Overview

Part Three: Texts, Writers and Contexts

Writing in Revolution: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and William Wordsworth

Extended commentary: Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), Book IX, lines 436- 504

Revolution, Reaction and the Natural World: Wordsworth and Coleridge, John Clare and William Blake

Extended commentary: Blake, 'The Tyger' from Songs of Experience (1793)

Dramatic writing: Horace Walpole, Robert Southey and Lord Byron

Extended commentary: Walpole, The Mysterious Mother (1768), V.i.312-420

Romantic Verse Narratives: John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Extended commentary: 'The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner' (1817), lines 1-40 and 610-17

Romantic Fiction: James Hogg, Thomas Love Peacock and Jane Austen

Extended commentary: Austen, Persuasion (1816), Chapter 23

Romantic Travel Writing: William Beckford, Lord Byron and Mary Wollstonecraft

Extended commentary: Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), Letters 16 and 17

Part Four: Critical Theories and Debates

Imagination, Truth and Reason

Faith, Myth and Doubt

Heroes and Ant-Heroes

Forms of Ruin

Part Five: References and resources

Timeline

Further reading

Index