ABSTRACT
Romantic biography's a-historical, neo-conservative approach fails to get to grips with the social, political and philosophical radicalism of the Romantics themselves. To talk about 'Romantic biography', then, is to say as much about the Romanticism of biographers such as Thomas Moore, John Gibson Lockhart and Richard Holmes as that of biographees like Lord Byron, John Keats and P. B. Shelley. The collection as a whole is a call for Romantic biography to become both less Romanticized — to escape the influence of certain monolithic Romantic ideas or assumptions — and more Romanticized — to explore other ways of being Romantic — at the same time. The dangerous implications of the situation for Romantic biography hardly need spelling out. If Romantic biography is the product of Romantic assumptions, then it runs the risk of simply perpetuating Romanticism's canonized idea of itself.
