The selections from 132 authors in this anthology represent gender, social class, and racial and national origin as inclusively as possible, providing both greater context for canonical works and a sense of the era’s richness and diversity. In terms of genre, poetry, non-fiction prose, philosophy, educational writing, and prose fiction are included. Geographically, America, Canada, Australia, India, and Africa are represented along with Britain, emphasizing Romantic literature as a world literature. Biographical headnotes, explanatory footnotes, and an extensive bibliography clarify and illuminate the texts for readers.

D.L. MACDONALD is assistant professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary, author of Poor Polidari: A Critical Biography of the Author of the Vampyre, and co-editor of The Writer and Human Rights and Flaws in the Pattern: Human Rights in Literature.

D.L. Macdonald's profile page

Helen M. Buss is a professor of English at the University of Calgary. Her book on Canadian women’s life writing, Mapping Our Selves, won the Gabrielle Roy Prize. As Margaret Clarke, she has published novels, short stories and poetry.

Anne McWhir's profile page

“This is a massive, impressive collection that both challenges and guides us to see the literature of the period in its most vital, revolutionary context. By featuring and appropriately balancing the canonical and the obscure and much in between, this anthology reminds us that it is the diversity of the writers of the age that, more than anything else, stirs and astounds us.” — G. Kim Blank, University of Victoria

“This anthology provides an exciting, innovative, global approach to the study of what has been called the “Romantic” period. Poetry, prose, and criticism by canonical writers are presented along with texts by labouring-class women, journalists, slaves, and political thinkers from Britain, America, Canada, Africa, India, and Australia. Focusing on revolution and politics, editors D.L. MacDonald and Anne McWhir provide teachers and students with rich, historicized and intertextual contexts with which to study familiar and lesser-known authors. Intelligently conceived, containing a diverse range of works and a useful bibliography, The Broadview Anthology of Literature of the Revolutionary Period is a welcome addition to this often contested and fascinating field.” — Eleanor Ty, Wilfrid Laurier University