"This book attempts to link three British Romantics to three reader-response theorists of the twentieth century in accordance with the theoretical assumptions shared between their notions of interpretation: Charles Lamb to Wolfgang Iser, Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Stanley Fish, and William Hazlitt to Robert Jauss. It examines what Romanticism and reader-oriented criticism share in common: elitism and holism.

These two criticisms are based on the presumption that only a socially and intellectually elite reader is able to view the author's language in terms of its organic relationship with the text as a whole. The Romantics focused on the interpretive reproduction of Shakespeare through sympathetic identification with his characters."--BOOK JACKET.