Tracing the history of the ridiculous through Romantic and post-Romantic debates about sublimity, from the rediscovery of Longinus and the aesthetic theories of Burke and Kant to contemporary queer and postcolonial theory interested in silliness, lowness, and vulnerability, Reading the Romantic Ridiculous explores Romanticism's surprising commitments to ridiculousness in canonical material by writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jane Austen, and Charles Lamb as well as lesser-known material from joke books to children's literature.