A study of the concept of 'truth' in romantic literature, placing important romantic writers within a tradition of 'radical empiricism'.

Tim Milnes is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. From 1998 to 2001 he was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College, Oxford. He has published articles on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jeremy Bentham, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb, and is the author of Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and William Wordsworth: The Prelude (Palgrave, 2009). He is also the co-editor, with Kerry Sinanan, of Romanticism, Sincerity, and Authenticity (Palgrave, 2010) and is a consulting editor for the journal Hazlitt Studies.

Introduction: the pragmatics of romantic idealism; 1. Romanticising pragmatism: dialogue and critical method; 2. Pragmatising romanticism: radical empiricism from Reid to Rorty; 3. This living Keats: truth, deixis, and correspondence; 4. An unremitting interchange: Shelley, elenchus, and the education of error; 5. The embodiment of reason: Coleridge on language, logic, and ethics; Conclusion.