The aim of this book is to offer a new understanding of the way in which ‘imagination’ functions in key texts of the Romantic period and in particular of the way in which it is involved in two moments of cultural crisis: the British response to the French Revolution and the reaction to utilitarianism. Imagination thus figures in this study as a point of access to larger definitions and arguments about aesthetics and ‘representation’. My contention is that imagination is an integral and still undervalued component of cultural critique, both in this particular historical period and beyond. My chosen texts, with the possible exception of those by Coleridge and Hazlitt, are not the ones usually mustered to write a sympathetic and celebratory history of the creative faculty. Indeed for some of the writers I focus on, ‘imagination’ is predominantly a negative term; while for all of them it is problematic. My concentration on non-fictional prose writers in itself offers a revealingly different generic history of Romantic aesthetics, one which depends upon the necessarily discursive nature of such writing and one which avoids a preemptively celebratory account. It is a choice which I hope will implicitly and explicitly challenge some of our accepted notions of ‘literariness’ through this discursivity of both approach and materials.