The author of previous studies of the religious Dissent and Romantic literature in Britain (Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830, 2002; and Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime, 2012), Mark Canuel turns his attention in his latest monograph to dissent with a lower-case d, understood as the contestation of values and opinions in the socio-political and cultural spheres. To be sure, the two kinds of dissent are closely related in Canuel’s account, which identifies Nonconformists such as Joseph Priestley and William Godwin, who embraced a differentiated conception of social progress, as having inspired the development of a distinct ‘Romantic progressivism’. In contrast to ‘normative modes of enlightened progressivism’ (6), Romantic progressivism incorporates dissent into its very conception of socio-political and cultural progress. Distinguishing perfectionism from utopianism, Canuel argues that Romantic progressivists espoused a ‘version of perfectionism [that] not only admitted, but was constituted by division and conflict’ (8). By way of an explanatory analogy, he notes the conflicting demands on contemporary progressivist politics in the United States, demands for which a consensus-based model of progress is ill equipped. The book explicitly endorses the alternative, self-critical model of progressivism that it explores in the Romantic literature: ‘Whenever we’re both affirming our collective future and dissenting about its terms, we’re being Romantic’ (222). Organized in six chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, The Fate of Progress in British Romanticism concentrates on eight canonical Romantic writers: Barbauld, in an extended comparison with James Thomson (chapter two), Wordsworth (chapter three), Percy Shelley (chapter four), Coleridge and Keats (chapter five), and Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Austen (chapter six). Blake is discussed briefly in the Introduction and Scott in chapter six.