ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts present in the subsequent chapters of this book. Concerned with the perversity of incestuous emotions in the book, 'Incest on the Romantic Stage: Baillie, Byron, and the Shelleys', Frederick Burwick debunks the perception that the incest plots of Romantic theatre were nothing more than closet drama for the private titillation of select audiences. Unsettling critical stereotypes, Bernard Beatty in our book interrogates and reassesses the established view of Byron as nonconformist dandy and Decadent model, and Wordsworth as non-Decadent in his domestication in Grasmere. The book explores what is understood as Keats's poetics of intoxication, which has the ability to either inebriate with forgetfulness or contaminate with a heightened sensuous immersion. With an eye on the temporal and thematic proximity of De Quincey to literary Decadence, Alex Murray suggests that Romantic and Decadent writers shared similar awareness of modernity even if they did not share the same impending sense of intellectual catastrophe.
