1Romanticism – that “notoriously slippery concept” generally taken to refer to the heterogeneous cultural and intellectual movement that reared its hydra head in the overlapping revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries¹ – has always been prone to thorny ramification. Overleaping temporal and geographical boundaries, branching out from continental Europe to the British Isles and across the Atlantic, it has, since its earliest manifestations, undergone such restless self-division and off-shooting as to necessitate its own constant revisionist history: as Seamus Perry remarks, the “difficulty is not just knowing what it really means, but knowing even how to go about deciding what it really means”.² Already in the early twentieth century, A. O. Lovejoy was arguing that, as a singular noun, the designation had drifted into meaninglessness: “When a Romanticism has been analyzed into the distinct ‘strains’ or ideas which compose it, the true philosophical affinities and the eventual practical influence in life and art of these several strains will usually be found to be exceedingly diverse and often conflicting”.³ However, if such wayward internal diversity and conflict have sometimes been seen as a threat to any coherent understanding of the movement, and to the academic disciplines which have sprouted up around it, they have also helped to ensure that the Romantic tradition retain its uniquely barbed, ceaselessly fascinating brand of resilience well into the twenty-first century. As Isaiah Berlin suggested in his seminal study, The Roots of Romanticism (first given as a series of lectures in 1965, and then published in 1998), the singular triumph of Romanticism might be its very manifoldness or pluralism, a variety which puts to shame the more rigid, totalizing structures of thought which preceded it.

2In reconsidering the Romantic tradition today, we would be wise to remain open to its unruly multifariousness. It is in just such a spirit of fascination and openness to revision that the present volume sets out to investigate new facets of the vast and varied legacy of British Romanticism in the English-speaking world, from its most firmly established roots to its tenderest unfurling tendrils. The term “offshoots”, reminiscent of many Romantic-period artists’ interest in botany and organic form(s),⁴ should therefore be taken polysemously: as a “side shoot or branch” (stemming from or grafted onto something of which it becomes a part), but also, more generally, as anything “which originated or developed from something else” (OED), and which often breaks with its roots, veering, consciously or not, off course. This notion may also be said to branch out to other terms which lend themselves to fruitful inquiry, such as spin-offs (byproducts or incidental results of Romanticism) and break-offs (instances of temporary or permanent rupture or discontinuity with Romanticism). At stake is an interrogation not only of the nature of the ties between Romanticism and its descendent forms – including, but by no means limited to, overt intertextual references – but also of what makes something “Romantic” or “post-Romantic” in our contemporary critical lexicon. Must it have recourse to a specific network of images or tropes, or to a particular mode of perception or being-in-the-world? Need it give voice to a revolutionary spirit or sublime subjectivity; or show its medievalist colors; or probe the processes of irony and fragmentation; or affirm the power of the imagination; or embody the evasive tendencies at the heart of what Jerome J. McGann famously diagnosed as the “Romantic Ideology”?⁵ Should such characteristics be seen as playing on, or playing out, Romantic stereotypes, which reside at its petrified core or trunk; or do they, rather, play up its plastic identity? To what extent do post-Romantic works continue to inhabit a Romantic universe which may be viewed “not only as a moment of the past but as a dimension of human reality whose topicality goes on manifesting itself in and around us”?⁶

3The aim of this volume is therefore 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, sensitive to their own anxiety of influence or “monstrous debt”,⁷ willfully enter into an ambiguous relationship with the Romantic tradition. As Michael O’Neill, one of the most gifted readers of Romantic legacies, observed about a line of a poem by Ted Hughes which echoes Shelley’s “To a Skylark”: “‘[I]ncomprehensible both ways’ describes how many poems in the post-Romantic tradition engage with Romantic poetry. They have it ‘both ways’, honouring the past even when tenaciously at odds with it, enacting a response of nuanced flexibility that rationalist paraphrase finds ‘incomprehensible’”.⁸ Having it both ways here does not simply mean having one’s cake and eating it, too; it implies, rather, cultivating an openness to uncertainty, ambiguity, contradiction – or, to invoke one of the period’s most recycled if still evocative phrases, “Negative Capability”: a practice which Romantic-period writers have passed down to artistic as well as scholarly heirs of many different stripes. What Philip Roth once said of the pleasures of re-reading Saul Bellow (his own powerfully post-Romantic precursor) might likewise apply to the artist’s / scholar’s creative struggle with the broader Romantic tradition: “That the richly rendered surface is manifold with contradiction and ambiguity ceases to be a source of consternation; instead, the ‘mixed character’ of everything is bracing. Manifoldness is fun.”⁹

4This special issue is itself an offshoot of a research collaboration between ERIAC (Université de Rouen Normandie) and ERIBIA (Université de Caen Normandie), the first fruit of which was a one-day international conference held in Rouen and at which many of the articles gathered here were initially presented. Speakers were invited to address, among other topics, the question of how twentieth- and twenty-first-century artworks reaffirm, or disown, their Romantic inheritance, be it on aesthetic or political grounds; the ways in which Romanticism has mutated or evolved, with particular sensitivity to underexplored contexts; the reworking or calling into question of Romantic clichés; the way Romantic-period ideas or models have been reanimated in the light of contemporary concerns, such as ecology and the global climate crisis; or the ways in which Romanticism and its offshoots have been adapted to still-evolving genres (such as sci-fi and dystopian climate fiction) and across different media (including graphic novels, television series, video games, and pop and rock music), as well as in more traditional forms. If the diversity of compelling new approaches offered in response to these questions more than justified the inclusion of the articles brought together in the present volume, then it is also worth calling attention to the suggestive affinities which can be found across the collection, as will be seen in the synoptic outline which follows.

5The volume begins by looking at Keats’s presence in several twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, in which the poet and his work not only function as a major influence but in which they are also given new life as they get processed through the mechanisms of narrative prose fiction. Keats’s aesthetics of intensity and uncertainty permeates F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) and The Great Gatsby (1926), as Nathalie Cochoy argues in the volume’s opening article. Keats’s words resonate throughout the texts and colour the world of both novels, right down to the subtle shades of inner and outer landscapes. Fitzgerald, however, does not merely borrow Keats’s language, his mode of perception or his profound awareness of finitude; he goes further by using Keats’s vision to convey his characters’ moods, and finally to depict American identity at the beginning of the twentieth century, torn between renunciation and Romantic dreams. Cochoy thus defines Fitzgerald’s Modernist writing as emerging from and renewing Keats’s poetics.

6In the next article, Jeremy Elprin brings together two novels, Enduring Love by Ian McEwan (1997) and Falling Hour (2023) by Geoffrey D. Morrison. Though dissimilar in form and content, as Elprin points out, these novels both revive Keats’s letters and “resurrect” Keats as an emblematic – as well as problematic – Romantic figure and epistolary persona. In Enduring Love, Keats’s letters take on many functions within the plot, in the narrative structure, and even in an epistemological debate about the so-called opposition between poetry and science in the Romantic era. Allusions to Keats’s life and letters, echoes of his epistolary exchanges with Fanny Brawne, and other references to epistolary aesthetics abound in the novel and delineate a ghostly presence, which Elprin sees as “the trace of an ambivalent legacy”. In Falling Hour, the narrator’s “love-hate relationship with the Romantic poet” is no less ambivalent. Haunted by Keats’s letters and weaving them into his own train of thought, the narrator constantly returns to the same threads, attempting, however uncertainly, to unravel them (in both senses of the verb: to investigate and solve or explain them, but also to undo or allow them to become undone).

7Romantic poetry’s imprint may also be observed in other prose genres as well as in the visual arts. Next in the volume, Caroline Dauphin’s article examines the representation of the polypus – this disturbing, protean hybrid creature discovered in the eighteenth century – first in William Blake’s poems and then in two twentieth-century works: H. P. Lovecraft’s short story, “The Shadow Out of Time” (1936), and its 2013 comic-book adaptation by Ian Culbard. Dauphin raises the question of how the polypus “has become the embodiment of cosmic scale chaos, from the dawn of Romanticism to the dark nights of modern writers and artists”. Thus, after having provided a detailed account of the meaning of the polypus in Blake’s works, Dauphin studies how this motif transcends time, exploring the connections between the Romantic poet, Lovecraft and Culbard. In both the short story and its graphic-novel version, the monstrous creature proves a fruitful metaphor for depicting abnormality and a nightmarish vision of humankind. 

8The next three articles take a different if no less timely approach to the question of genre-crossing offshoots, probing, in their turn, formal and thematic resonances between Romantic lyric poems and twentieth- and twenty-first-century rock and pop songs. In this respect, they attest to a surge in interest in rock and Romanticism, or “Rocking Romanticism”, as the burgeoning domain is dubbed in a recent collection of essays.¹⁰ In the first of this series of articles in the present volume, Janneke van der Leest sketches a brief history of “narcissistic Romantic mourning” from the 1790s to the 1970s, charting a course from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s youthful composition of his “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” (a text first published in 1790 but to which he returned obsessively in subsequent years) and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (1821), to Jim Morrison’s “Ode to L.A. While Thinking of Brian Jones, Deceased” (1969) and Patti Smith’s homage to Jim Morrison, “Break It Up” (1975). Through her reading of the “double portrait” of the iconic poet / songwriter presented in each of these works, van der Leest posits Morrison and Smith as latter-day practitioners of an essentially Romantic mode of mourning, one that came into vogue towards the end of the eighteenth century but which remains vital to elegiac forms of cultural production today.

9Along similar lines, but with a shift in focus to a lesser-known rock offshoot, Fabien Desset’s article sheds light on the ways in which the music of the Ukrainian progressive rock band Karfagen, founded by Antony Kalugin, draws on its own multifaceted Romantic heritage, in particular that of William Blake. If The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) has long been mined for its darkly prophetic proverbs (Jim Morrison’s appropriation of Aldous Huxley’s allusion to “the doors of perception” being but one prominent example), then it is Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) which has proven his most pervasive and lasting influence on rock music. Taking a “transaesthetic” approach to the study of Kalugin’s adaptation of two of Blake’s texts from Songs of Innocence, “The Ecchoing Green” and “Spring”, alongside the fragment “Eternity”, Desset considers the extent to which the album Birds of Passage (2020) stages a Romantic flight towards “innocence”, under the ever-present threat of contamination by “experience”. Grounded in a detailed analysis of the linguistic and musical transpositions at play in individual tracks, while also paying attention to the larger structure of the album (including the design of its booklet), Desset’s article invites us to hear intriguing Romantic affinities across aesthetic and temporal borders.

10From psychedelic rock to punk rock to prog rock, not only does the Romantic tradition continue to inject itself into the evolving countercultural landscape; it also gets channeled, in challenging ways, into some of the most culturally dominant – for better or worse, catchy – pop songs of our time. If the leap from Coleridge, Shelley and Blake to Jim Morrison, Patti Smith and Karfagen might be readily comprehended, the association of William Wordsworth with Taylor Swift, the most successful female artist of the twenty-first century, may come to some as a surprise. However, as Cal Sutherland demonstrates, in an article which makes a strong case not only for the spectacular reach of the Lyrical Ballads across time and place and into the age of COVID lockdowns and online “cottagecore”, but also for the subtle literariness and ideational complexity of Swift’s folklore-era lyrics, the pairing of two such seemingly disparate, hugely influential figures can be accounted for on both aesthetic and ideological grounds. By highlighting intertextual echoes and looking, more specifically, at Swift’s reworking of a pastoral-georgic mode closely linked to Wordsworth’s poetry and its criticism of changing labor relations in industrial Britain, Sutherland elucidates their shared recourse to the motif of rural retreat, which, in the lyrics of Swift, becomes a means of engaging with contemporary questions related to community and care. In this suggestive reading, Wordsworth’s poetry is seen not only as a site of local resistance to the exploitative logic of industrial capitalism but also as a matrix for the development of new forms of lyrical contestation – or new modalities of the “monstrous debt” discussed above – in an increasingly digitized and alienating world.

11The passage from Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats – five of the notorious “Big Six” Romantic male poets, with Byron waiting in the wings for a “pre-post-apocalyptic” appearance (see below) – to one of today’s most iconic female artists (and whose hit song, “The Man” [2019], has been cheered as a feminist anthem uniquely attuned to our era) should also remind us of the inescapably gendered dimension of Romanticism’s modern-day offshoots. Indeed, an important task of twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars has been to recover the voices of women and other minority figures long pushed to the margins of history, and whose work has been warped or effaced outright by the entrenched literary canon. As Armelle Parey shows, in the volume’s next article, this project has also been taken up by contemporary filmmakers, including Haifa Al-Mansour and Frances O’Connor, whose respective biopics, Mary Shelley (2017) and Emily (2022), contribute to the redefinition and revaluation – or “re-authoring” – of two writers associated with Romanticism, Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë. Reading the author biopic genre as itself a Romantic offshoot, rooted in a reverence for the inspired solitary genius, Parey goes on to examine the ways in which both films appropriate the fictional world of the novels for which their subjects are best known, while striving to convey an empowering image of female authorship that chimes with contemporary feminist revisions to the reception of Romantic-period artists and writers.

12The last two articles of the volume address the persistence of Romantic motifs in a video game and in two television series, confirming that Romantic-era writers and thinkers have left a lasting mark on contemporary cultures and imaginaries. The first article in this section traces a genealogy of fungi, from the scientific perspective of Linnaeus and Erasmus Darwin to Romantic perceptions and ultimately their post-apocalyptic representation in the video game The Last of Us (2013-2020) and its 2023 TV series adaptation created by Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin. Not unlike Caroline Dauphin’s approach to the polypus, Camille Adnot first highlights the unstable status of fungi within classification systems. She goes on to analyse the interpretation of fungi in the works of Erasmus Darwin, William Blake and P. B. Shelley, where these enigmatic organisms, turned into monstrous “agents of […] the dissolution of human identity”, are used to challenge pastoral conventions. Such a fascination with these hybrid and awe-inspiring creatures is also evident in the game and the TV show The Last of Us, where humans may be transformed into fungal hybrids. In this way, both media, “inherit[ing] Romantic anxiety” and imagination, reflect on environmental crisis and the post-human.

13Last in this collection of essays is Aurélie Thiria-Meulemans’s study of two of Byron’s poems, “Darkness” (1816) and Cain, A Mystery (1824), and their connection with Dan Fogelman’s television series Paradise (2025). Thiria-Meulemans begins by examining the prophetic dimension of Byron’s poems: the apocalyptic visions they evoke, the threats of extinction and of the annihilation of humankind which reveal Byron’s acute – and science-based – awareness of the radical interconnectedness and fragility of life on our planet. The series Paradise, which foregrounds its Byronic inheritance in many respects, is but one offshoot of a literary genre – climate fiction, or “cli-fi” – that emerged at the end of the twentieth century and which has gained prominence, particularly in visual media, in recent years. Thiria-Meulemans’s argument goes even further: by working retrospectively and reversing Harold Bloom’s notion of influence, she contends that Byron’s poems not only prophetically imagined the environmental issues of the Anthropocene, but also heralded the invention of post-apocalyptic fiction and climate fiction. Rereading Byron’s texts after watching Paradise, she suggests, allows us to interpret them as “pre-post-apocalyptic”. Thiria-Meulemans’s article thus serves as an open-ended, time-warping conclusion to the volume, as a whole, attesting, once again, to the polypus-like ramifying of British Romanticism: a boundary-blurring, genre-crossing process through which new, hybrid strains, demanding fresh critical attention and revised taxonomies, continue to germinate, put out shoots, and take root in contemporary culture.