Introduction

The introduction elaborates the key claim of the book, namely that Robinson was the most pioneering comparative critic in England during the early Romantic period. He developed a revolutionary theory of literature’s cross-cultural ethical relevance from his unrivalled understanding of Kantian and post-Kantian thought, the Anglo-French philosophical tradition, as well as his broad reading across English, German, and French literature, primarily. Robinson’s prescient 1802 critique of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads as generating non-didactic moral discourse emerges as the exemplary manifestation of his critical approach, according to which a poet’s aspiration to artistic disinterestedness, though never to be fulfilled entirely, may function as a catalyst for moral disinterestedness. The introduction further places this claim in its historical and present-day contexts – from Hazlitt, Schiller, and the Schlegels’ critical schools to Walter Benjamin’s dissertation on German Romantic criticism to the present ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies – before parcelling it out by means of chapter synopses. It also clarifies the terminology that Robinson applied, for instance ‘literator’ for his career choice of cross-cultural literary critic and disseminator – or comparatist, in today’s terms.