Romantic writers worked during one of the most momentous epochs of western cultural history. It was an epoch defined by responses to the revolutionary politics which were epitomized by the French Revolution. Romanticism traces the major writers, terms and debates associated with the genre. It surveys various readings by contemporaries of Romanticism, and brings the survey up to date by considering post-structuralist, new historicist and gender-oriented perpectives on the subject.

In a volume which is theoretically informed, yet accessible and jargon-free, Aidan Day summarizes changing views of Romanticism in relation to what has, until recently, been seen as the canon of British Romantic writers: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. The writings of these poets, still the basis of many readings of Romanticism, are placed in the context of political and philosophical thinkers such as Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. At the same time, the issues raised in the book are discussed in relation to a wide range of other writers of the period, both canonical and non-canonical, from Jane Austen and Robert Burns to Charlotte Smith and Anna Laetitia Barbauld.