Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost

Resurrecting Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a major literary figure and visual artist of the second half of the nineteenth century, this book is a conscious reaction to the last sixty years of literary criticism - in which Rossetti's work has been diminished and downplayed. McGann asserts the enormity of Rossetti's accomplishment by pointing out that Rossetti was the central artistic and intellectual figure of his generation, whose influence extended from Swinburne to Wilde to Yeats of Pound. McGann ultimately contends that Rosetti was the major conceptual artist of his generation, whose work prefigured many of the major aesthetic shifts of the twentieth century.