"Radical Romanticism is an intellectual history of the progressive democratic, religious, and environmental beliefs and practices that informed 18th- and 19th-century European Romantic literature and their subsequent and sustained legacies in North America. The book argues that this tradition can assist in the ongoing project of cultivating democratic and environmental theory as both ideology to be critiqued and inheritance to be appropriated. The hallmarks of radical romanticism are not sublimity in allits natural and spiritual manifestations but the poignant human encounters and events that bring attention to experiences of war, empire, misogyny, white supremacy, environmental degradation, and oppressive political and religious institutions. It views the moral imagination as a powerful tool to transform worlds-worlds public and private, human and more-than-human. Among the surprising North American inheritors of radical romanticism is W.E.B. Du Bois, who in his account of the Chickasawhatchee swamp inGeorgia considers the natural world not as pristine, untouched by humans, and ahistorical but rather as intimately and explicitly related to culture and history, more akin to Wordsworth's landscape in "The Ruined Cottage," unearthing the "untold stories"of the vulnerable poor. This comparison hints at the complexity of romanticism: its uncertain beginnings and endings, and its challenges to colonialism, capitalism, slavery, and the subjugation of women, on the one hand, and its escapist replacement for religion, complicit in genocide and other forms of domination of people and place, on the other. Mark Cladis juxtaposes Du Bois, Terry Tempest Williams, and Leslie Silko with Rousseau, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau to construct an engaged poetics and aesthetics deeply embedded in everyday life and informed by Du Bois' notion of "a dark, wild hope" rooted in suffering and grief and inspired by the struggle for religious, political, and environmental transformation"-- Provided by publisher.
Romanticism is often reduced to nostalgic pastoralism and solitary contemplation of the sublime. But a radical strand of Romantic writers and thinkers offered sweeping political, ecological, and religious critiques of capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, and environmental destruction. Interweaving canonical nineteenth-century authors with Black and Indigenous thinkers who transformed their work, this book is a bold new account of Romanticism for today’s deeply entrenched crises.
Mark S. Cladis examines the progressive democratic, religious, and environmental beliefs and practices that informed European Romantic literature and its sustained legacies in North America. His interpretation interweaves diverse voices such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Leslie Marmon Silko while also revealing the progressive visions of Romantic authors such as Rousseau, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Forging connections among literary and philosophical traditions while closely reading a wide range of texts, Radical Romanticism shows how storytelling is central to the pursuit of justice and flourishing for the human and the more-than-human worlds. Bringing together environmental humanities, literary theory, political theory, and religious studies, this book makes the case for a renewed radical Romanticism, offering urgent resources for a world beset by catastrophe, uncertainty, and despair.
Interweaving canonical nineteenth-century authors with Black and Indigenous thinkers who transformed their work, this book is a bold new account of Romanticism for today’s deeply entrenched crises.
