Revision and Romantic Authorship

The Romantic author is often portrayed as spontaneous, extemporizing, otherworldly, and alone. Zachary Leader argues that this influential fiction is much in need of revision. Romantic attitudes to authorship profess a preference for what comes naturally, with a concomitant devaluing of secondary processes, including second thoughts, yet many Romantic writers such as Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Coleridge, Clare and Mary Shelly revised their works. Revision and Romantic Authorship looks at the revisionary practices these writers, showing that second thoughts (including those of collaborators) in fact play a crucial role in 'Romantic' compostion. Other attitude compicated by the actual revisionary practices of Romantic writers are those which associate compostion with the organic and with process, or which characterize authors as autonomous agents or figures of coherent and consistent subjectivity. In the first part of the book, Leader shows how revisionary and editorial practices reflect conflicting attitudes to the self or personal identity; in the second, these attitudes are related to the role of collaborators' in the revising process (family, friends, editors, critics, readers).