Professor Galperin has examined the relationship of canonical Romantic writing to both contemporaneous and contiguous developments in British literature and culture, beginning with his first book, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: The Interpretation of a Career (1989). His study of Wordsworth explores the relationship between the poetry of Wordsworth’s so-called “great decade” and the poet’s middle and later poetry, showing how the later poetry, far from an anticlimax, represents a sharply critical engagement with the poet’s overtly Romantic writings and the hierarchies they install. In a similar vein, his second book, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (1993), demonstrates the extent to which Romantic culture was less a movement in the sway of a single or dominant ideology than a site of competing ideologies. Professor Galperin’s most recent book, The Historical Austen (2003) extends his effort to identify an expanded Romanticism by engaging the. The largest of this study's concerns, particularly in its reconception of Romantic-period writing, involves the development of the novel itself, whose progress to realism is complicated by the possible worlds that animate the otherwise probable world that Austen's fiction is generally thought to serve. Professor Galperin is currently at work on a related project tentatively titled "The History of Missed Opportunities: Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday".
