Key Concepts in Romantic Literature is an accessible and easy-to-use scholarly guide to the literature, criticism and history of the culturally rich and politically turbulent Romantic era (1789-1832). The book offers a comprehensive and critically up-to-date account of the fascinating poetry, novels and drama which characterized the Romantic period alongside an historically-informed account of the important social, political and aesthetic contexts which shaped that body of writing.

The epochal poetry of William Wordsworth, William Blake, Mary Robinson, S. T. Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, P. B. Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon; the drama of Joanna Baillie and Charles Robert Maturin; the novels of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley; all of these figures and many more are insightfully discussed here, together with clear and helpful accounts of the key contexts of the age's literature (including the French Revolution, slavery, industrialisation, empire and the rise of feminism) as well as accounts of perhaps less familiar aspects of late Georgian culture (such as visionary spirituality, atheism, gambling, fashion, music and sport). This is the broadest guide available to late eighteenth and early 19th century British and Irish literature, history and culture.

JANE MOORE is Reader in English Literature and Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University, UK. She is an experienced teacher of Romantic women's writing and Romantic poetry and has published widely in these fields, most particularly, Mary Wollstonecraft (1999) and, more recently, The Satires of Thomas Moore (2003). She is co-editor (with Catherine Belsey) of The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, (2nd Edition, 1997).

JOHN STRACHAN is Professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Sunderland, UK. He is the author of Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (2007) and the editor of many editions of Romantic poetry including British Satire 1785-1840 (2003), the Poems of John Keats: A Sourcebook (2003) and Leigh Hunt's Poetical Works (2003). He is Associate Editor for Romanticism for the Oxford Companion to English Literature (7th edition, 2009).