Satire and Romanticism

Romantic poetry is conventionally seen as inward-turning, sentimental, sublime, and transcendent, whereas satire, with its public, profane, and topical rhetoric, is commonly cast in the role of generic other—as the un-Romantic mode. This book argues instead that the two modes mutually defined each other and were subtly interwoven during the Romantic period. By rearranging reputations, changing aesthetic assumptions, and re-distributing cultural capital, the interaction of satiric and Romantic modes helped make possible the Victorian and modern construction of “English Romanticism.”

Steven E. Jones is Professor of English at Loyola University in Chicago.