The Trembling Hand

Bracing and essential, this text provides a radical reframing of British Romanticism through the lens of Black experience. Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats - the Romantic poets are titans of English literature, taught and celebrated around the world. Their work is associated with sublime passions, violent stormscapes and a questing search for the inner self. It is rarely associated with the racial politics of the transatlantic slave economy. But these literary icons lived through a period when individual and collective resistance by Black people in Britain and her overseas colonies was making it increasingly difficult - and increasingly costly - to ignore their demands for freedom. This work turns an urgent critical gaze onto six major Romantic authors, examining how their lives and works were entangled with the racist realities of their era.