CONCEPT
The Romantic Ideology
McGann's 1983 diagnosis that literary criticism has uncritically adopted the Romantic poets' self-understanding — the myth of solitary genius — and mistaken it for an objective description of creation.
In The Romantic Ideology (1983), McGann argued that the critical tradition's account of Romantic poetry had been compromised by its uncritical acceptance of the Romantic poets' own self-descriptions. The poets understood themselves as solitary geniuses whose works arose from the depths of authentic inner experience; critics treated this self-understanding as a premise rather than a proposition. The result was a framework that rendered invisible the social, economic, and institutional conditions under which Romantic poetry was actually produced — the publishers who negotiated content, the editors who shaped presentation, the reading public whose expectations every agent was calibrated to serve. The ideology persists because it serves the economic interests of the publishing industry, for which the author-as-solitary-genius is a marketable brand. Its afterlife extends into the AI moment, where it produces the specific cultural panic that surrounds acknowledged machine collaboration.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The argument was controversial when first advanced because it challenged the foundational assumptions of Romantic studies as a