David Duff studied in York and taught in Poland at the Nicholas Copernicus University of Torun and the University of Gdansk before moving to Scotland. He has published widely on Romantic poetics and book history. His previous publications include Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (1994), an anthology of Modern Genre Theory (2000), and a co-edited collection, Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (2007). He is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism and The Oxford Anthology of Romanticism, a major new teaching anthology.

The question of genre is still one of the thorniest in literary criticism, and its complexities persist beyond all theoretical paradigms brought to bear on it. Romantic genre, arguably the very ground of our cultural conundrums about reference, historicity, and class, has found a worthy scholar in David Duff, who gathers the dense materials of his subject with an unblinking rigor ... judicious and impressive

• Preface ; List of Illustrations ; Introduction ; 1. The Old Imperial Code ; 2. Romantic Genre Theory ; 3. (Anti)-Didacticism ; 4. Archaism and Innovation ; 5. The Combinatorial Method ; Conclusion ; Bibliography ; Index

David Duff studied in York and taught in Poland at the Nicholas Copernicus University of Torun and the University of Gdansk before moving to Scotland. He has published widely on Romantic poetics and book history. His previous publications include Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (1994), an anthology of Modern Genre Theory (2000), and a co-edited collection, Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (2007). He is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism and The Oxford Anthology of Romanticism, a major new teaching anthology.

The question of genre is still one of the thorniest in literary criticism, and its complexities persist beyond all theoretical paradigms brought to bear on it. Romantic genre, arguably the very ground of our cultural conundrums about reference, historicity, and class, has found a worthy scholar in David Duff, who gathers the dense materials of his subject with an unblinking rigor ... judicious and impressive

• Preface ; List of Illustrations ; Introduction ; 1. The Old Imperial Code ; 2. Romantic Genre Theory ; 3. (Anti)-Didacticism ; 4. Archaism and Innovation ; 5. The Combinatorial Method ; Conclusion ; Bibliography ; Index