Revision and Romantic Authorship

The Romantic author as spontaneous, extemporizing, otherworldly, and autonomous is a fiction much in need of revision. Romantic attitudes to authorship profess a preference for what comes naturally, with a concomitant devaluing of secondary processes, yet many Romantic writers such as Wordsworth, Byron, and Mary Shelley revised their works. In this highly regarded volume, Zachary Leader unveils the revisionary practices of these writers, showing that second thoughts in fact played a crucial role in Romantic composition.