ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines how and why Victorian biographies translated the literary careers and personal lives of Anna Aikin Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley into shadowy, spectral versions of their former selves. It focuses on Severn’s life-long and pivotal obsession with the tragedy of the premature physical event of John Keats’s demise to discover that the nineteenth century finds itself in protracted mourning for Keats more so than any other Romantic figure and haunted by the persistent posthumous existence of Keats. The book explores the redeployment of the specific Romantic figure of Prometheus in response to the altering Victorian political, cultural, and artistic scene. The various visual and literary representations of Romantic figures and concepts in Victorian culture shaped the inception of Romanticism as a cultural phenomenon well into the twentieth century.
