De Man presented Rousseau et le romantisme anglais at the University of Geneva on June 5, 1978, as the last in a series of eight guest lectures commemorating the bicentennial of the deaths of Rousseau and Voltaire. The lecture is a shorter variant of what appeared as “Shelley Disfigured” in the 1979 collection Deconstruction and Criticism. For that work, Bloom and Hartman had asked de Man, Miller, and Derrida to contribute essays on Shelley's Triumph of Life in order, as Hartman writes in the preface, both to acknowledge “the importance of Romantic poetry” and to demonstrate the “shared set of problems” preoccupying this group. “Shelley Disfigured” was republished in de Man's 1984 retrospective collection of essays The Rhetoric of Romanticism, where he singles out the essay as “the only place where [he came] close to facing [the] questions about history and fragmentation” that resurged upon his looking back over twenty-five years of his work on Romantic literature.

To publish this English translation of a French variant of “Shelley Disfigured” is to revisit the issues of fragmentation and monumentalization that frame that essay (not to mention de Man's own definition of translation as a “desacralization of the original”). Given the relative proximity between a lecture given in June 1978 and an essay published in December 1979, it is impossible to determine which preceded the other in terms of a coherent, genetic narrative.