Romanticism is hip if this killer line from pop poetess Natasha Bedingfield is anything to go by. Yet the Romanticism that popular culture finds endlessly desirable is resolutely heteronormative. Bedingfield’s number one hit is after all about the impossibility of writing heterodesire (she chooses some particularly complicated heterosexual poets to lay some drum beats down on!) although, of course, a queer interpretation is hardly disallowed. Let us take another couple of examples of this straightening out of Romanticism to make it more palatable to a contemporary audience. Julian Temple’s 2001 film Pandaemonium takes the potentially very uninteresting relationship between Coleridge (Linus Roach) and Wordsworth (John Hannah) and the composition of the Lyrical Ballads as its focus and turns them into the punks of their day. Temple is, after all, the director of The Filth and the Fury, a rockumentary about the Sex Pistols. Punks Coleridge and Shelley (Byron, on the other hand, comes across as the fifth Beatle) may be, but none of the sexual ambiguousness of Rotten or Vicious or of the whole punk aesthetic is allowed to colour the relationship between the pair or indeed the erotics of their collaboration, which Wayne Koestenbaum has so wonderfully unpacked. Then in 2003 we had bad boy Byron played by bad boy Jonny Lee Miller (once married to the bisexual bad girl Angelina Jolie) in a two-part BBC drama. The depiction of Byron is careful to have Miller limp all the way through, but there is little or none of the dissident sexuality which has made Byron something of a poster boy for queer Romanticism. In his review, Duncan Wu notes this reluctance: Romanticism in the academy has tended to be rampantly hetero too. We have had Queering the Middle Ages,Queering the Renaissance,Victorian Sexual Dissidence, and Queering the Moderns, but no Queering the Romantics or Queering Romanticism. In a recent special issue of this journal, on “Romanticism and Sexuality,” Richard Sha explains why this might be the case. He claims that Romanticism is very often seen as little more than a speed bump between the Enlightenment and the Victorian period, an asexual black hole in the history of sexuality. In his essay and a subsequent article published in a more recent issue, Sha critiques this mischaracterization of Romanticism as a “seemingly asexual zone between eighteenth-century edenic ‘liberated’ sexuality and guiltless pleasures, and the repressive sexology of the Victorians that enabled real sexuality to emerge” (“Romanticism” n. pag.). Several of the contributors to this volume are equally committed to challenging the way Romanticism has dropped out of our histories of sexuality and to rethinking the lines of periodization as they have conventionally been drawn. Rick Incorvati, Robert Tobin and Arnold Markley all find homosexual personality types in Romantic novels written long before the so-called invention of the modern homosexual, circa 1869, if one is to believe Foucault and his epigoni. It is the hope of each of our contributors that this rethinking of Romantic sexuality might, as Incorvati puts it, “compel us to reconsider both the prevailing history of sexuality and the role that the Romantic period played in establishing the preconditions for writing that history.” We call this special issue Queer Romanticisms because we want to signal the queerness of Romanticism as a period. Like queer, Romanticism is always messy, excessive, overspilling historical and corporeal boundaries. Like queer, Romanticism is resistant to the impulsion on the part of critics to define it, pin it down, place a cordon sanitaire around it. Romanticism and queer theory alike favour the indefinite and the boundless. …