Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832While scholars have long noted the fascination with Roman literature and history expressed by many preeminent British cultural figures of the early and middle eighteenth century, they have only sparingly commented on the increasingly vexed role Rome played during the subsequent Romantic period. This critical oversight has skewed our understanding of British Romanticism as being either a full scale rejection of classical precedents or an embrace of