It is doubly problematic for an author to publish a new edition of a book of literary criticism twenty-five years after it was first written: he himself is no longer the person he was then, and literary studies are also no longer what they were a quarter of a century ago.

As far as the first part of the problem is concerned, I may perhaps say here without vanity that I have never felt obliged to dissociate myself in general from what my former self wrote about the English romantic tale in verse. While I readily admit that the book contained immaturity of judgement, gaps and the occasional misplaced emphasis, these were all of such a nature that with conscientious reworking and abbreviation it was possible to eradicate them without having to produce a completely new version, and even the thought that the English reading public of the 1990s would approach critically something that was presented to a German faculty in 1962 as a postdoctoral thesis did not force me to make drastic alterations. The second part of the problem is more difficult: is it possible in this period of structuralism, deconstruction and the introduction into literary studies of sociological questions, linguistic methodology, demystifying philosophy and semiotic, intertextual and ideologically critical approaches to literature to republish a genre study that ‘naively’ and eclectically amasses material to show what thoughts about genre in narrative poetry were current from 1798 to 1830? Has not the material collected then also since been rendered obsolete by more recent research?