The problem of Rousseau's presence within English Romanticism, especially among the major poets, which is to say Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, and Shelley, has been treated by traditional comparative literature as a simply historical question. It has been treated, that is to say, at the level of so-called general ideas, idées reçues, and commonplaces to which the history of ideas sometimes risks sacrificing the complexity of readings. The works that treat the question are few, especially in the English and German realms, where the reading of Rousseau continues to come up against some very deeply entrenched prejudices. The already mentioned works by Roddier and Voisine, both of which are dedicated to the excellent literary historian and friend of Jean Wahl, J. M. Carré, still provide the best inventories of the question and, along with Joseph Texte's book, a catalogue of the idées reçues concerning it.

The question immediately comes up against a considerable difficulty of reading. The main Romantic text where Rousseau appears in his own name presents a daunting challenge to the reader. Rousseau's presence is not inconsiderable but remains allusive and implicit in Wordsworth's Prelude, where it is often the educational theme of Emile that comes into play and where the oft cited analogy between the interiority and retrospective temporality of the autobiographical narratives, The Prelude and The Confessions, is so general that it cannot amount to more than a simple suggestion.

De Man presented Rousseau et le romantisme anglais at the University of Geneva on June 5, 1978, as the last in a series of eight guest lectures commemorating the bicentennial of the deaths of Rousseau and Voltaire. The lecture is a shorter variant of what appeared as “Shelley Disfigured” in the 1979 collection Deconstruction and Criticism. For that work, Bloom and Hartman had asked de Man, Miller, and Derrida to contribute essays on Shelley's Triumph of Life in order, as Hartman writes in the preface, both to acknowledge “the importance of Romantic poetry” and to demonstrate the “shared set of problems” preoccupying this group. “Shelley Disfigured” was republished in de Man's 1984 retrospective collection of essays The Rhetoric of Romanticism, where he singles out the essay as “the only place where [he came] close to facing [the] questions about history and fragmentation” that resurged upon his looking back over twenty-five years of his work on Romantic literature.

To publish this English translation of a French variant of “Shelley Disfigured” is to revisit the issues of fragmentation and monumentalization that frame that essay (not to mention de Man's own definition of translation as a “desacralization of the original”). Given the relative proximity between a lecture given in June 1978 and an essay published in December 1979, it is impossible to determine which preceded the other in terms of a coherent, genetic narrative.