Romantic Misfits / Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print (PDF)

ROBERT MILES is the English Department Chair at the University of Victoria, Canada, and was formerly so at the Universities of Stirling and Sheffield Hallam in the UK. His publications include Gothic Writing 1750-1820, Ann Radcliffe: the Great Enchantress and Jane Austen: Writers and their Work.

'. . .a book that contains such a wealth of material and perceptive discussion...' - English Studies

'Miles offers a nuanced understanding of Romanticism's origins, cultural manifestations, and legacy. Romantic Misfits makes important points about the limitations of the historical models that have organized Romantic studies, and it attests to the rewards of critically examining scholarly clichés and cultural givens.' - Nicole Reynolds, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

'Robert Miles's Romantic Misfits is an erudite, far-ranging reconsideration of Romanticism that cleverly fuses both old and new conceptualizations of the period. . . Romantic Misfits remains an outstanding, learned and deeply thoughtful achievement, presenting an updated narrative of Romantic critical history that will solidify the reader's grasp of the interplay and progress of seminal modes of thought.' - Celestine Woo, Romantic Circles Review

'This project creates the opportunity for a wide-ranging discussion on the vexed issue of the 'canon', and Miles's five chapters consider a comprehensive selection of writers.' - English Studies

'Robert Miles's wonderful new book, Romantic Misfits, examines the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion in the formation of the Romantic poetic canon. . . Miles's wide-ranging chapters on W.H. Ireland's Shakespeare forgeries, Wordsworth's Gothic, Thomas Carlyle's and Coleridge's abjects, the Romantic novel's technologies, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld's feminism are chock-full of magical and fresh material.' - Studies in English Literature, 49:4

'His interrogation of these processes of selection and organization which have had such enduring impact, not just on the formation of the Romantic canon but more fundamentally, on our inherited ideas about literature itself, is driven by a shrewd blend of theoretical analysis (especially Pierre Bourdieu and Jurgen Habermas, though Miles helpfully reads the latter through J.L. Austen's speech