Romanticism And Speculative Realism

"Romanticism and Speculative Realism features a range of scholars working at the intersection of literary poetics and philosophy. It considers how the writing of the Romantic era reconceptualizes the human imagination, the natural world, and the language that correlates them in radical ways that can advance current speculative debates concerning new ontologies and new materialisms. In their wide-ranging examinations of canonical and non-canonical romantic writers, the scholars gathered here rethink the connections between the human and non-human world to envision speculative modes of social being and ecological politics. Spanning historical and national frameworks - from historical romanticism to contemporary post-romantic ecology, and from British and German romanticism to global modernity - these essays examine life in all its varied forms in, and beyond, the Anthropocene."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Reads Romantic literature through the lens of 21st century speculative realist philosophyRead and download the series editor's preface (by Graham Harman) and the Introduction to Romantic Realities for free nowSpeculative realism is one of the most exciting, influential and controversial new branches of philosophy to emerge in recent years. Now, Evan Gottlieb shows that the speculative realism movement bears striking a resemblance to the ideas and beliefs of the best-known British poets of the Romantic era.Romantic Realities analyses the parallels and echoes between the ideas of the most influential contemporary practitioners of speculative realism and the poetry and poetics of the most innovative Romantic poets. In doing so, it introduces you to the intellectual precedents and contemporary stakes of speculative realism, together with new understandings of the philosophical underpinnings and far-reaching insights of British Romanticism.Readings include:The poetry and poetics of Wordsworth in relation to Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology and Timothy Morton's dark ecologyColeridge's poems and ideas in relation to Ray Brassier's philosophical nihilism and Iain Hamilton Grant's revisionist readings of SchellingShelley's oeuvre in relation to Quentin Meillassoux's radical immanentism and Manuel DeLanda's process ontologyByron's best-known poems in relation to Alain Badiou's truth procedures and Bruno Latour's actor-network-theoryKeats' oeuvre in relation to Levi Bryant's onticology and Ian Bogost's alien phenomenology"e;

Romanticism and Speculative Realism features a range of scholars working at the intersection of literary poetics and philosophy. It considers how the writing of the Romantic era reconceptualizes the human imagination, the natural world, and the language that correlates them in radical ways that can advance current speculative debates concerning new ontologies and new materialisms. In their wide-ranging examinations of canonical and non-canonical romantic writers, the scholars gathered here rethink the connections between the human and non-human world to envision speculative modes of social being and ecological politics. Spanning historical and national frameworks-from historical romanticism to contemporary post-romantic ecology, and from British and German romanticism to global modernity-these essays examine life in all its varied forms in, and beyond, the Anthropocene.

Romanticism and Speculative Realism features a range of scholars working at the intersection of literary poetics and philosophy. It considers how the writing of the Romantic era reconceptualizes the human imagination, the natural world, and the language that correlates them in radical ways that can advance current speculative debates concerning new ontologies and new materialisms. In their wide-ranging examinations of canonical and non-canonical romantic writers, the scholars gathered here rethink the connections between the human and non-human world to envision speculative modes of social being and ecological politics. Spanning historical and national frameworks-from historical romanticism to contemporary post-romantic ecology, and from British and German romanticism to global modernity-these essays examine life in all its varied forms in, and beyond, the Anthropocene.

Romantic Revelations shows that the nonhuman is fundamental to Romanticism’s political responses to climatic catastrophes. Exploring what he calls "post-apocalyptic Romanticism," Chris Washington intervenes in the critical conversation that has long defined Romanticism as an apocalyptic field. "Apocalypse" means "the revelation of a perfected world," which sees Romanticism’s back-to-nature environmentalism as a return to paradise and peace on earth. Romantic Revelations, however, demonstrates that the destructive climate change events of 1816, "the year without a summer," changed Romantic thinking about the environment and the end of the world. Their post-apocalyptic visions correlate to the beginning of the Anthropocene, the time when humans initiated the possible extinction of their own species and potentially the earth. Rather than constructing paradises where humans are reborn or human existence ends, the later Romantics are interested in how to survive in the ashes after great social and climatic global disasters. Romantic Revelations argues that Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, John Clare, and Jane Austen sketch out a post-apocalyptic world that, in contrast to the sunnier Romantic narratives, is paradoxically the vision that offers us hope. In thinking through life after disaster, Washington contends that these authors craft an optimistic vision of the future that leads to a new politics.

Material Transgressions reveals how Romantic-era authors think outside of historical and theoretical ideologies that reiterate notions of sexed bodies, embodied subjectivities, isolated things, or stable texts. The essays gathered here examine how Romantic writers rethink materiality, especially the subject-object relationship, in order to challenge the tenets of Enlightenment and the culture of sensibility that privileged the hegemony of the speaking and feeling lyric subject and to undo supposedly invariable matter, and representations of it, that limited their writing, agency, knowledge, and even being. In this volume, the idea of transgression serves as a flexible and capacious discursive and material movement that braids together fluid forms of affect, embodiment, and textuality. The texts explored offer alternative understandings of materiality that move beyond concepts that fix gendered bodies and intellectual capacities, whether human or textual, idea or thing. They enact processes – assemblages, ghost dances, pack mentality, reiterative writing, shapeshifting, multi-voiced choric oralities – that redefine restrictive structures in order to craft alternative modes of being in the world that can help us to reimagine materiality both in the Romantic period and now. Such dynamism not only reveals a new materialist imaginary for Romanticism but also unveils textualities, affects, figurations, and linguistic movements that alter new materialism’s often strictly ontological approach. List of contributors: Kate Singer, Ashley Cross, Suzanne L. Barnett, Harriet Kramer Linkin, Michael Gamer, Katrina O’Loughlin, Emily J. Dolive, Holly Gallagher, Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, Mary Beth Tegan, Mark Lounibos, Sonia Hofkosh, David Sigler, Chris Washington, Donelle Ruwe, Mark Lussier.

This book is the first major ecocritical study of the relationship between British Romanticism and climate change. It analyses a wide range of texts – by authors including Lord Byron, William Cobbett, Sir Stamford Raffles, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley – in relation to the global crisis produced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. By connecting these texts to current debates in the environmental humanities, it reveals the value of a historicized approach to the Anthropocene. British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene examines how Romantic texts affirm the human capacity to shape and make sense of a world with which we are profoundly entangled and at the same time represent our humiliation by powerful elemental forces that we do not fully comprehend. It will appeal not only to scholars of British Romanticism, but to anyone interested in the relationship between culture and climate change.

George Berkeley's mainstream legacy amongst critics and philosophers, from Samuel Johnson to Bertrand Russell, has tended to concern his claim that the objects of perception are in fact nothing more than our ideas. Yet there's more to Berkeley than idealism alone, and the poets now grouped under the label 'Romanticism' took up Berkeley's ideas in especially strange and surprising ways. As this book shows, the poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley focused less on Berkeley's arguments for idealism than they did on his larger, empirically-derived claim that nature constitutes a kind of linguistic system. It is through that 'ghostly language' that we might come to know ourselves, each other, and even God. This book is a reappraisal of the role that Berkeley's ideas played in Romanticism, and it pursues his spiritualized philosophy across a range of key Romantic-period poems. But it is also a re-reading of Berkeley himself, as a thinker who was deeply concerned with language and with written--even literary--style. In that sense, it offers an incisive case study into the reception of philosophical ideas into the workings of poetry, and of the role of poetics within the history of ideas more broadly.