Romanticism and Speculative Realism

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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 frameworksfrom historical romanticism to contemporary post-romantic ecology, and from British and German romanticism to global modernitythese essays examine life in all its varied forms in, and beyond, the Anthropocene.

Reviews

A worthy contribution to the storied encounter between Romanticism and theory, this time through a series of provocations regarding speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and the new materialisms. Given how many perceive Romanticism as the apotheosis of the material/ideal divide, Romanticism and Speculative Romanticism is a timely and necessary collection. * Orrin N.C. Wang, Professor of English, University of Maryland, USA, and author of Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (2011) *
The topic of extinction in all its ramifications, including extinguishing the exceptionalism of the human, is strikingly apt now, but this volume reveals how this and related topics were already embedded in Romantic thought and art. Romanticism and Speculative Realism lays out what was hidden in plain sight. So much of the recent and current work in Romantic studies is encapsulated in these essays, and indeed, the hen kai pan of Romantic speculative thought has never felt more contemporary. * Elizabeth Fay, Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Boston, US, and author of Fashioning Faces: The Portraitive Mode in British Romanticism (2010) *

Author Bio

Anne C. McCarthy is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State University, USA. Chris Washington is Assistant Professor of English at Francis Marion University, USA.