Romantic Poets And The Laughter Of Feeling Is A New And Original Reading Of British Romanticism. While The Romantic Period Witnessed Decisive Interest In How Feeling Might Align With Forms Of Artistic Expression, Most Critical Studies Have Focused On The Serious Side And Melancholic Moods Of Romantic Poets. This Book Takes A Markedly Different Approach, By Embracing The Sublime And The Ridiculous, And Revealing The Decisive Role Laughter And The Laughable Play In Romantic Aesthetics, Emotions, And Ethics. As This Study Uncovers, Laughter Was One Of The Principle Means By Which Romantics Embraced And Expanded Upon, But Also Frequently Aped And Lampooned, Sympathetic Feeling. The Laughter Of Feeling Is Both The Expression Of Sympathy And An Articulation Of Its Implications, Prejudices, And Constraints. Voicing Faith In Sympathy, It Also Speaks To The Complicated And Ambivalent Responses Of Romantics To It: At Once Utterance, Ideology, And Irony. For Romantic Poets Like Wordsworth, Shelley, And Keats, The Sound Of Laughter Carries The Hope That Greater Knowledge Of Others Derives From Feeling For And With Them Through Poetry, And Might Lead To Better Understanding Of Oneself. Yet Laughter Also Makes Them All The More Aware That Our Emotional Lives Are Utterly Unfamiliar And Perhaps Ultimately Unknowable. Their Prosody Of Laughter Enlivens And Exposes: Embodies Their Sense Of And Ambitions For Poetry, And Calls Those Matters Into The Most Comical And Gravest Doubt. Laughter Helps Define What It Is To Be Human. This Book Shows That It Also Defines What It Is To Be A 'romantic' Poet-- Provided By Publisher.