Studies the afterlife of the Romantic idea of spontaneity in transatlantic modern prose in the work of William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Herman Melville, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Saul Bellow, to provide a broad-based historical enquiry into what it means to read, write, and live as a modern person. To read prose for spontaneity is to imaginatively experience prose being spontaneously rewritten. Ravinthiran models this experience delightfully, in a range of texts whose delights have been kept from literary criticism far too long.