Romanticism is often regarded as a turning point in literary history, the time when writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge renounced the common legacy of poets and sought to create a new literature. Yet despite their emphasis on originality, genius, and spontaneity, the first-generation Romantics manifest a highly intertextual style that, while repressing certain classical and neoclassical literary conventions, reveals a deep dependence on those same rhetorical practices. Repression results in the symptoms of originality but it inevitably leads to the return of tradition in a different form.

In Romantic Aversions J. Douglas Kneale explicates the "double gesture" in the repression of the classical tradition by focusing on its rhetorical afterlife in the literary styles of Wordsworth and Coleridge. He provides new interpretations of both canonical and non-canonical texts and explores aspects of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's manuscripts and poems previously overlooked by scholars.

Kneale combines original, close readings with the larger sweep of genre study to reveal new and unexpected convergences in the Romantic tradition.