Romanticism and Speculative Realism

by Chris Washington, Anne C. McCarthy

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501366734
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	07/23/2020
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Chris Washington is Assistant Professor of English at Francis Marion University, USA.

Anne C. McCarthy is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State University, USA, where she teaches courses in Romantic and Victorian literature and literary theory. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Studies in Romanticism, Victorian Poetry, and PMLA, as well as several edited collections. Her first book is Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry (forthcoming).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Literature and Philosophy in The World Without Us
Chris Washington (Francis Marion University, USA) and Anne C. McCarthy (Penn State University, USA)

1. Of Meillassoux's Contingencies and Scott's Plots: Rethinking Probability in a World of Unreason
Evan Gottlieb (Oregon State University, USA)
2. Affect and Air: The Speculative Spirit of the Age
Michele Speitz (Furman University, USA)
3. Feeling as Hyperobject in Wordsworth's The Prelude
Joel Faflak (University of Western Ontario, Canada)
4. Blank Oblivion, Condemned Life: John Clare's "Obscurity"
David Collings (Bowdoin College, USA)
5. Speculative Enthusiasm: William Blake's Jerusalem and Quentin Meillassoux's Divine Ethics
Allison Dushane (Angelo State University, USA)
6. Surfing the Crimson Wave: Romantic New Materialisms and Speculative Feminisms
Kate Singer (Mount Holyoke College, USA)
7. Post-Apocalyptic Romantic Politics: Reveries of Rousseau, Derrida, and Meillassoux
Chris Washington (Francis Marion University, USA)
8. Astral Guts: No-Self in Byron and Brassier
Aaron Ottinger (University of Washington, USA)
9. A Perilous Change of Correspondence: Romanticism after [Nature]
Mary Jacobus (University of Cambridge, UK)
10. Plasticity, Poetry, and the End of Art: Malabou, Hegel, Keats
Greg Ellermann (Concordia University, Canada)
11. Poe's Black Cat
Graham Harman (American University of Cairo, Egypt)
12. Objects Taken for Wonders in Equiano's Interesting Narrative
Alexander Dick (University of British Columbia, Canada)
13. An Object-Oriented Media Studies: The Case of Romantic Cookery Books
Brian Rejack (Illinois State University, USA)

List of Contributors
Index

Editorial 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)

From the Publisher