"Romantics and Renegades examines an abiding crux of romantic criticism: the political apostasies of the Lake poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey) as they renounced the revolutionary Jacobinism of their youth in the 1790s in order to claim the high ground of Regency Toryism in the 1810s. Central to this scandal is the figure of William Hazlitt, the literary critic who policed their betrayals in his vigilant exposure of their political and poetical inconsistencies.

Taking his cues from Hazlitt's critique, Mahoney investigates more traditional definitions of apostasy as political or religious betrayal, before proceeding to redefine it in terms more suited to its vertiginous rhetorical functions in otherwise conservative rhetoric. Mahoney's analysis provides new insight into this abiding critical riddle through close historical and figural readings of the rhetoric of romantic apostasy."--BOOK JACKET.