This “Introduction” offers a brief historical and theoretical background for the essay contributions that follow. It gives an editorial rationale for why we and these essays' authors aim to seek different ways of reading that merge or overlap questions of aesthetic form, social life, and affective disposition. We begin with the reminder that the imaginative precincts within which such questions might be raised were always and already inseparable for Romantic writers: in the Romantic poetics outlined here, feeling is not strictly private. We then provide summaries of the four essays and afterword, placing emphasis on the authors' various attention to sociable affects, including disgust, complicity, guilt, and hope.