Explains why 'fracture' and 'fragmentation' are two crucial concepts in Romanticism.
Broken origins: an introduction; 1. A brotherhood is broken: Babel and the fragmentation of language; 2. Figuring it out: the origin of language and anthropomorphism; 3. Forces trembling underneath: the Lisbon earthquake and the sublime; 4. A blue chasm: Wordsworth's The Prelude and the figure of parenthesis; 5. Letters from the grave: John Keats's fragmented corpus; 6. The doubling force of citation: De Quincey's Wordsworthian archive; 7. Philological fractures: Paul de Man's Romantic rhetoric.