Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited

by Richard C. Sha (Editor), Joel Faflak (Editor)

Overview

With explosive interest in Romantic science and theories of mind and a renewed sense of the period’s porousness to the world, along with new developments in cognitive theory and research, Romantic studies scholars have been called to revisit and re-map the terrain laid out in the highly influential 1970 volume Romanticism and Consciousness. Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited brings this shift in approach to Romantic “consciousness”—no longer the possession of a sole self but transactional, social, and entangled with the outside world—up to date.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474485111
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	05/31/2024
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Richard C. Sha is Professor of Literature and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at American Universityin Washington, DC. He is the author of Imagination and Science in Romanticism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), which won the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize in 2018. In 2020, the National Endowment for the Humanities of the United States selected this book as one of twelve books in the humanities to fund for open access publication. His previous books include Perverse Romanticism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008) and with Joel Faflak, Romanticism and the Emotions (Cambridge UP, 2016).

Joel Faflak is Professor of English and Theory at the University of Western Ontario. He is author of Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery (SUNY, 2008), co-author (with Ross Woodman) of Revelation and Knowledge: The Psyche in Romanticism (U of Toronto Press, 2011), and editor or co-editor of numerous essay collections and anthologies, most recently Romanticism and the Emotions (Cambridge UP, 2016), with Richard C. Sha, and William Blake: Modernity and Disaster (U of Toronto Press, 2020), with Tilottama Rajan.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: Romanticism and Consciousness Redux - Richard C. Sha and Joel Faflak

Part 1: New Models of Consciousness

2. Romanticism Against Consciousness - Alan Richardson

3. Romantic Panpsychism - Colin Jager

4. Shelley and the Real of Faith - Joel Faflak

5. Blakean Experience and the Hard Problem of Consciousness Revisited - Richard C. Sha

Part 2: States of Consciousness

6. ‘Poetry is passion’: Lyrical Balladry as Affective Narratology - Mark J. Bruhn

7. After Affects and Second Thoughts: Wordsworth, Eliot and the Forms of Emotional Thinking - Nancy Yousef

8. Studio States: Thought Out of Place - Jacques Khalip

9. The Media Ecology of Romantic Consciousness: Knowledge in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head - Ralf Haekel

Part 3: Social and Ecological Models of Consciousness

10. Why Reasonable Children Don’t Think that Nutcracker is Alive or that the Mouse King is Real - Lisa Zunshine

11. Prone Minds and Extended Selves: The Cenci - Yasmin Solomonescu

12. Gothic Ecologies of Mind - John Savarese

13. May Flies and Horseshoe Crabs: Romantic and Post-Romantic Consciousness, Institutions, and Populations - Robert Mitchell

Part 4: Race and Consciousness

14. Shapeshifting Romantic Consciousness - Kate Singer

15. At Peace with Strangers: Feeling Disoriented in the London Panorama of Constantinople, 1801–1802 - Humberto Garcia

16. Doubling Down: On White Consciousness, Friends and The Friend - Julie A. Carlson

List of ContributorsIndex

Editorial Reviews

The greatest strengths of this volume come, firstly, from the subtle call to think carefully about how we make the move between the ethical and the epistemological, and secondly, from the implication that there may be Romantic romances, quest-like or otherwise, between mind and world, and between different parts of consciousness, that contemporary philosophies of mind are only just enabling us to understand. Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited calls on the self-reflexive powers of literature to create genuine dialogues with philosophies of mind, rather than making the coherence of literary texts depend on deployments of philosophical thinking.

Romantic Circles - Merrilees Roberts

Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited contains fascinating, readable essays that display the best of cognitive approaches in literary studies. It is suitable for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students in Romanticism courses. While many scholars will want to own their own copy, it definitely belongs in every university library.

Wordsworth Circle - Lisa Ann Robertson

This splendid collection returns to Harold Bloom’s Romanticism and Consciousness and revisits that 1970 collection’s field-defining questions about subjectivity and the modern self. Engaging scholarship on neuroscience, cognitive theory and philosophy of mind, Faflak, Sha, and their eminent contributors renew the concept of Romantic consciousness for the twenty-first century.

Deidre Lynch