Offers fresh understanding of British Romanticism by exploring how anxieties about decline impacted debates about literature's form and meaning.

Introduction; 1. From morals to measurement: scaling time, anticipating the future, and quantifying decline in Gibbon, Smith and Playfair; 2. The decline of literature: acceleration, print saturation, and media time; 3. The politics of prediction: Anna Barbauld and the ruins of London; 4. On ruins: contingency, time parallax, and 'the ruined cottage'; 5. Coleridge's slow time; 6. Fast time, slow time, deep time: the pace of romanticism.

Jonathan Sachs is Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the author of Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832 (2010) and co-author of Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in an Age of Print Saturation (2017).