English Romantic Irony

Anne Mellor here offers the conceptual framework for a better understanding of the Romantic writers. Her penetrating study yields new interpretations of Byron, Keats, Carlyle, and Coleridge. The Romantics have been seen as expressing a secularized version of a divinely ordered universe. Mellor emphasizes another strain in Romanicism, one linked to the philosophical skepticism and social turbulence of the age: a conception of the universe as random motion, as a fertile chaos that always throws up new forms.