Reading is a weirdly phantasmic trade: animating words to revive absent voices, rehearing the past, fantasizing a future. In Romantic Shades and Shadows, Susan J. Wolfson explores spectral language, formations, and sensations, defining an apparitional poetics in the finely grained textures of writing and their effects on present reading.

Framed by an introductory chapter on writing and apparition and an afterword on haunted reading, the book includes chapters of sustained, revelatory close attention to the particular, often peculiar, literary imaginations of William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, W. B. Yeats, and John Keats. Wolfson also explores the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a self-confessed Ghost-Theorist), Mary Shelley, and other writers of the Long Romantic era, canonical as well as less familiar. All are encountered in freshly pointed ways on an arc of investigation that builds with generative force.

Romantic Shades and Shadows is written with a lucidity, wit, and accessibility that will appeal to general readers, and with a critical sophistication and scholarly expertise that will engage advanced students, critics, and professional peers.

Setting the stage: apparitions of writing -- Shades of Will + words + worth: what's in a name? -- Hazlitt's conjurings: first acquaintance & "quaint allusion" -- Shelley's phantoms of the future in 1819 -- Me and my shadows: Byron's Company of ghosts -- Shades of relay: Yeats's latent Keats / Keats's latent Yeats -- After wording: writing of apparitions.

"Romantic Shades and Shadows is, at heart, a book about literary allusion. Each poem, book, or play that one encounters is imbued with verbal textures, turns of phrase, and ideas and things that summon the specter of older literary bodies. The poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, for example, is haunted by the writings of Shakespeare and Milton. In tracing ghostly patterns to find literary and contextual linkages, Susan J. Wolfson explores the shifting boundaries that separate one literary time period from another, and teaches her readers how best to conduct close readings of Romantic texts" -- Provided by publisher.