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).

carefully written book * London Review of Books *
...a scholarly work, packed with detail and loaded with footnotes. It is also enlightening, witty and provocative. Revision and Romantic Authorship argues its case, through a mass of primary evidence, with ease and consistency. * Times Literary Supplement *
Leader's book takes a refreshingly sceptical view of contemporary editorial practices and critical assumptions, and provides a valuable antidote to what he convincingly argues can amount to a misleading fetishism of the spontaneous in Romanticism and Romantic studies ... much of the value of his book resides in its careful readings of individual literary works. Leader is often both subtle and clarifying in his readings of writers' revisions. * Andrew Bennett, University of Bristol, Romanticism on the Net 5 *
an intelligent and well-researched book * Nineteenth-Century Literature 51:4 (March 1997) *
Revision and Romantic Authorship is an intelligent, articulate, and well-documented analysis of recent textual scholarship and current theories of editing as these fields impinge upon critical understanding of the English Romantics ... those who have missed the beginning of the lively debates among editors and require a readable introduction to some of the issues now in play in the burgeoning field of textual theory should find ample value here as a starting point from which to engage both the texts of the Romantics and the primary documents underlying the various versions of those texts. * Donald H. Reiman, University of Delaware, The Wordsworth Circle, Autumn '96 *

Zachary Leader is Professor of English Literature at Roehampton Institute, London