Romanticism (ed. Cynthia Chase)

I was lured into picking up this book by the promise of the back that the essays in it 'exemplify the most important strands in contemporary critical thought on Romantic literature' and being a shameless whore for the Romantics, I wanted a good guide to what critical work on Romanticism is like. Unfortunately, 'contemporary' here means 1993 and most of the essays here are just Freud, Freud, Freud, Lacan, Freud, and a tiny bit of actual textual analysis. Many essays are unbearably theoretical, the first one didn't even have a single quote from the works it dealt with. I thought that the best essay was 'Time and History in Wordsworth' by Paul de Man, which has some fascinating and perceptive textual analysis of various parts of The Prelude. The essay on the responses to and mystery of Christabel, 'Literary Gentlemen and Lovely Ladies' by Karen Swann, also had some interesting and reasonable ideas. But overall, I found it almost impossible to read due to its denseness and its obsessive worship of Freud. I am also more interested in later Romantics, and this book was dominated by Wordsworth and Coleridge (actually mostly Wordsworth).