In “Genres of the Everyday: Romance, Realism, Romanticism,” I argue that romanticism invents the concept of the everyday as a dialectic: a conflict between genres (romance and realism), between temporalities (past and present), between provinces (local and imperial) and between subjectivities (anonymity and its undoing). This dialectical understanding of the everyday emerges from Romantic-era experiments in literary form and genre. The writers I turn to—Jane Austen, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, and the sporting journalist Pierce Egan—invent new aesthetic forms to account for the kinds of vertiginous social and historical experience that could be said to structure everyday life at the onset of industrial modernity. Jane Austen’s early free indirect discourse presents a clash between romance and realism as discursive modes for representing a character’s consciousness. This clash reveals the manner in which intelligible linguistic communities struggle to reproduce themselves—a condition unique to commercial modernity. For Walter Scott, the dialectical nature of the everyday might be grasped temporally, as a conflict between past and present. What I call Scott’s narrative “assemblage” captures how an emergent bourgeois consciousness comes to be divorced from history and yet is still haunted by the violence of the historical past. What I call Wordsworth’s “poetic realism” grasps the dialectical nature of the everyday through spatial terms: a conflict between urban and rural and between local and imperial. Lastly, Pierce Egan imagines an elastic, anonymous subjectivity that develops from the metropolitan panoramic narrative—a subjectivity that eventually unravels under the pressure of the capitalist marketplace. Throughout these four case studies, the everyday emerges not—or not merely—as the site of a pregiven, static reality but rather as an unsettled and unsettling site of political, social, and historical contestation.