Romanticism: A Critical Reader is designed both as a companion and a supplement to Blackwell's Romanticism: An Anthology . It deals for the most part with works included in that volume while affording coverage to key elements, including fiction, beyond the anthologist's scope to include. Most of the movements and schools of thought active during the last fifteen years are represented, including feminism, new historicism, genre theory, psychoanalysis, and deconstructionalism. The reader provides thus a progress report, useful to anyone interested in the application of theoretical ideas to literary texts, giving a unique overview of Romantic studies since 1980.

Duncan Wu is a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford, and a post-doctoral Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of Wordsworth's Reading 1770-1799 (1993) and co-editor with Stephen Gill of a new edition of Wordsworth: Selected Poems (1994).