ABSTRACT
Romantic writers reshaped the romance world, replete with brave chivalric heroes, youthful paramours, cruel tyrants, wizards and fairies, living out their fantastic existences amongst those elfin grottoes, secluded bowers, and leafy vales of Arcady. Romantics returning to this charmed space prized romance as a literary genre with a rich history of political, social and aesthetic controversy. Responding to the catastrophic events of the French Revolution and domestic political affairs, romanticism redefined, but retained, the traditional quest motif and crucial dualities of innocence and experience, life and death, surface and depth, and ideal and real. Anxious to ensure that their newly emerging poetical identities were aligned with a genuinely English cultural ancestry, Keats and Shelley both composed romances for their major poetical debuts. Their predilection for the romance mode reflects how tentatively Keats and Shelley nurtured their poetic aspirations to ascend those lofty Miltonic heights or attain those equally revered, but more accessible, Spenserian groves.4
