Romanticism is a doomed tradition, yet a perpetually self-renewing one. The novel, Disgrace's central character, David Lurie, is an academic, a literary scholar, a Romanticist, in fact. Coetzee develops an interpretation of European Romanticism. His book is thus in great measure a satiric investigation of a wide range of Romantic ideologies, from Wordsworthian sincerity, on one end, to Byronic intellectual flamboyance on the other. If Romanticism is perpetually 'doomed' and perpetually 'self-renewing', those reciprocities draw on a common energy source: imaginative scepticism. Hemans poem locates not a sceptical deficiency but the exact form of Hemans's Romanticism. 'Byron' and 'The Sceptic' are magical mirrors giving Hemans access to that dreadful Christian situation within which Hemans's special Romanticism exfoliates: the Romanticism of maternal fear and anxiety. Romantic works flourish all about us in popular and highbrow art, music, and writing.