UC Irvine

This dissertation examines the Romantic beginnings of nineteenth-century British liberalism. It argues that Romantic authors both helped to shape and attempted to resist liberalism while its politics were still inchoate. By shifting the question of Romantic politics away from the traditional radical/revolutionary and conservative/loyalist binary forward into the more ambiguous realm of early liberalism, the dissertation develops new readings of both first- and second-generation Romantic authors, including Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt.