7 | 2026
Romantic Offshoots: Reassessing the Legacy of British Romanticism

The aim of this volume is twofold: first, to open up a space for the reassessment of artworks which hark back to, riff on, pay homage to, or uproot their Romantic precursors, while also teasing out some of the more oblique correspondences or affinities between British Romanticism and its descendent forms; and, second, to reexamine the notion of literary inheritance itself, as it pertains to such works – particularly the ways in which many twentieth- and twenty-first-century works willfully enter into an ambiguous relationship with the Romantic tradition.

This special issue is itself an offshoot of a research collaboration between ERIAC (Université de Rouen Normandie) and ERIBIA (Université de Caen Normandie). The articles gathered here address the ways in which Romantic-period ideas or models have been reanimated in the light of contemporary concerns, in still-evolving genres (such as sci-fi and dystopian climate fiction, neo-historical biopics, or pop and rock music) and across different media (including graphic novels, television series, and video games), as well as in more traditional forms.