The Romantic age was one of anger and its consequences: revolution and reaction, terror and war. Stauffer explores the changing place of anger in the literature and culture of the period, as Englishmen and women rethought their relationship to the aggressive passions in the wake of the French Revolution. Drawing on diverse fields and discourses such as aesthetics, politics, medicine, and the law, and tracing the classical legacy the Romantics inherited, he charts the period's struggle to define the relationship of anger to justice and the creative self.