In “Romanticism’s Generative Reading,” Susan Wolfson convenes an innovative array of subjects, texts, and cultural situations: lightning, Frankenstein, textual editing, Shakespeare read by girls, and William Empson’s revelatory influence. Wolfson reads with close attention to the strange densities of literary language and the multiplicities of literary imagination.
Great writers are generative writers, she argues, transforming readers through the energies of reading. Exploring texts and contexts, Wolfson traces literary formations and historical dynamics generating and regenerating one another.
