WORK
The Romantic Ideology (Book)
McGann's 1983 Chicago monograph arguing that literary criticism's account of Romantic poetry was compromised by its uncritical adoption of the poets' own self-understanding.
The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (1983) was published the same year as A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism and extended McGann's challenge to conventional literary scholarship into the interpretive rather than the editorial domain. The book argued that literary criticism's treatment of Romantic poetry had been shaped by critics' uncritical adoption of the Romantic poets' own self-descriptions — their accounts of solitary genius, authentic inner experience, and original inspiration — as if these accounts were objective descriptions of how the poetry worked. The result was a critical tradition that rendered invisible the social, economic, and institutional conditions under which Romantic poetry was actually produced.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book drew on Louis Althusser's concept of ideology to argue that the Romantic self-understanding was not merely a set of beliefs held by individual poets but a systematic ideology that shaped subsequent generations of criticism. Critics who analyzed Romantic poems within the framework the poems themselves provided were not engaged in objective scholarship; they