During the 1790s and 1800s, cultural critics became convinced that Britain was being 'inundated' by pernicious literary translations imported from the European Continent. British Romanticism and Continental Influences discusses Romantic writers' complex and ambivalent responses to this threatening literary invasion. Confronted with foreign texts that seemed both attractive and repulsive, Mortensen argues, Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge publicly distanced themselves from European sensationalism, even as they assimilated and revised its conventions in their own writing.

'This book will make an important contribution to the new wave of Romantic studies currently broadening the worldly contexts of Romanticism away from a narrowly conceived English nativism.' - Saree Makdisi, Professor of English, University of California