Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era explores a fascinating connection between two seemingly unrelated Romantic-era discourses, outlining the extent to which eighteenth and early nineteenth century theories of sympathy were generated by crises of state finance.

Robert Mitchell is Assistant Professor of English at Duke University, USA.

Acknowledgments; Abbreviations; Introduction; Chapter 1. Finance and the Exchange of Passions: The Origins of the Collective Imagination; Chapter 2. The Violence of System: Rousseau and Smith on Identification and Sympathy; Chapter 3. Anti-Slavery Poetry and the Speculative Subject; Chapter 4. Systems and the Parasite: Wordsworth and the Financial Crisis of 1797; Chapter 5. The Ghost of Gold: National Debt, Imagery, and the Politics of Sympathy in P. B. Shelley; Conclusion. State Finance, Systems, and Literary Criticism; Endnotes; Bibliography