Reading the Romantic Ridiculous

Reading The Romantic Ridiculous aims to take Romantic Studies from the sublime to the ridiculous. Building on recent work that decentres the myth of the solitary genius, this duograph theorises the ridiculous as an alternative affect to the sublime, privileging collective laughter above solitude and selfishness and reflecting on these ideals through the practice of joint authorship. Tracing the history of the ridiculous through Romantic and post-Romantic debates about sublimity, from the rediscovery of Longinus and the aesthetic theories of Burke and Kant to contemporary queer and postcolonial theory interested in silliness, lowness, and vulnerability, Reading the Romantic Ridiculous explores Romanticism’s surprising commitments to ridiculousness in canonical material by writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jane Austen, and Charles Lamb as well as lesser-known material from joke books to children’s literature. In theory and practice, this duograph also considers the legacies of Romanticism - and ridiculousness - today, analysing their influence on independent film, sitcoms, and young adult fiction, as well as their place in higher education now.

Andrew McInnes is Reader in Romanticisms and Co-Director of EHU Nineteen: Research Centre in Nineteenth-Century Studies at Edge Hill University.

Rita J. Dashwood is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic project at the University of Liverpool.