ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on an exciting moment in the history of Anglo-German literary exchange in the Romantic period, the moment of George Gordon Byron's and Percy Bysshe Shelley's interrelated encounters with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's seminal dramatic poem, Faust. It shows that a distinction needs to be made between the whole of Faust, and Faust I as a separate work. The book considers how Faust II shifts the drama toward the epic, but with dubious political connotations, brought to light in the work of Franco Moretti and others. It draws comparisons between Goethe, Byron, and Shelley in terms of the similarly ambiguous and, often consciously, critical positions in which Byron's and Shelley's works sit in relation to the 'tragic' and the 'epic', and so to Faust.
