"This study of the constructive and ultimately canon-forming relationship between satiric and Romantic modes of writing from 1760 to 1832 provides us with a new understanding of the historical development of Romanticism as a literary movement. 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."--BOOK JACKET.