Romantic Feuds: Transcending the Age of Personality

Despite their desire to rise above the so-called age of personality and personal attacks, Romantic-era figures such as Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, Sydney Owenson, and the explorer John Ross became enmeshed in public feuds with the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review. Finding literary genres and themes of transcendence within these vituperative exchanges, Wheatley argues that the feuds themselves unexpectedly contributed to the emergence of Romanticism.