Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760-1820

by Evan Gottlieb (Editor), Samuel Baker (Contribution by), Miranda Burgess (Contribution by), Ian Duncan (Contribution by), Anthony Jarrells (Contribution by)

Overview

For several decades, interest in the British Romantics’ theorizations and representations of the world beyond their national borders has been guided by postcolonial and, more recently, transatlantic paradigms. GlobalRomanticism: Origins, Orientations, andEngagements, 1760–1820 charts a new intellectual course by exploring the literature and culture of the Romantic era through the lens of long-durational globalization. In a series of wide-ranging but complementary chapters, this provocative collection of essays by established scholars makes the case that many British Romantics were committed to conceptualizing their world as an increasingly interconnected whole. In doing so, moreover, they were both responding to and shaping early modern versions of the transnational economic, political, sociocultural, and ecological forces known today as globalization.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611486261
Publisher:	University Press Copublishing Division
Publication date:	12/18/2014
Series:	Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	342
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Evan Gottlieb is associate professor of English in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations
Introduction: British Romanticism and Early Globalization: Developing the Modern World Picture
Evan Gottlieb

Part I: Origins
Chapter One: Spawn of Ossian, Ian Duncan
Chapter Two: Burke and Hemans: Colonialism and the Claims of Family, Stuart Peterfreund
Chapter Three: Charlotte Smith’s Network Story, Yoon Sun Lee
Chapter Four: Localizing and Globalizing Burns’ Songs: Romanticism and the Analogies of Improvement, Steve Newman

Part II: Orientations
Chapter Five: “[N]o place on earth/ Can ever be a solitude”: Lyrical Ballads, Hartleianism, and a World of Places, Michael Wiley
Chapter Six: Sailing Blind: Climacteric Orientations toward the Local and Global in Wordsworth and Byron, Samuel Baker
Chapter Seven: We have Never been National: Romance, Regionalism, and the Global in Scott’s Waverley Novels, Anthony Jarrells
Chapter Eight: Frankenstein’s Transport: Modernity, Mobility, and the Science of Feeling, Miranda Burgess

Part III: Engagements
Chapter Nine: John Galt’s Logics of Worlds, Matthew Wickman
Chapter Ten: Romantic Recycling: The Global Economy and Secondhand Language in Equiano's Interesting Narrative and the Letters of the Sierra Leone Settlers, Debbie Lee and Kirk McAuley
Chapter Eleven: Global Flows: Romantic-era Terraforming, Robert Mitchell
Afterword: The World Viewed, Katie Trumpener

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Part of the 'Transits: Literature, Thought, and Culture, 1650–1850' series, this collection builds on the foundation of post-colonialism to explore how Romantic writers viewed themselves in relation to other peoples, places, and world literatures. As a time when the British Empire was expanding and technological and scientific innovations were making it possible to have easier contact with the rest of the world, this period can be seen as the beginning of 'globalization.' Written by an impressive group of scholars, the essays Gottleib has brought together explore this topic through a wide variety of Romantic authors, from the well-known to the obscure. The most interesting chapters examine the connection between Robert Burns’s writings and the independence movement in India, the genre of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and its connection with the ill-fated African English colony in Sierra Leone, and the unusual climate reformation ideas of Erasmus Darwin and Percy Shelley. Both wanted to reform the world’s climate by loosening the ice caps, but Shelley had the even more extreme idea of straightening Earth’s axis in the hope that all the world would enjoy a temperate climate. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Choice Reviews

The excellent essays in the collection tend to explore the interface between nascent imperial formations and emergent understandings of how subjects and populations are linked around the globe

SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

Part of the 'Transits: Literature, Thought, and Culture, 1650–1850' series, this collection builds on the foundation of post-colonialism to explore how Romantic writers viewed themselves in relation to other peoples, places, and world literatures. As a time when the British Empire was expanding and technological and scientific innovations were making it possible to have easier contact with the rest of the world, this period can be seen as the beginning of 'globalization.' Written by an impressive group of scholars, the essays Gottleib has brought together explore this topic through a wide variety of Romantic authors, from the well-known to the obscure. The most interesting chapters examine the connection between Robert Burns’s writings and the independence movement in India, the genre of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and its connection with the ill-fated African English colony in Sierra Leone, and the unusual climate reformation ideas of Erasmus Darwin and Percy Shelley. Both wanted to reform the world’s climate by loosening the ice caps, but Shelley had the even more extreme idea of straightening Earth’s axis in the hope that all the world would enjoy a temperate climate. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Choice

Part of the 'Transits: Literature, Thought, and Culture, 1650–1850' series, this collection builds on the foundation of post-colonialism to explore how Romantic writers viewed themselves in relation to other peoples, places, and world literatures. As a time when the British Empire was expanding and technological and scientific innovations were making it possible to have easier contact with the rest of the world, this period can be seen as the beginning of 'globalization.' Written by an impressive group of scholars, the essays Gottleib has brought together explore this topic through a wide variety of Romantic authors, from the well-known to the obscure. The most interesting chapters examine the connection between Robert Burns’s writings and the independence movement in India, the genre of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and its connection with the ill-fated African English colony in Sierra Leone, and the unusual climate reformation ideas of Erasmus Darwin and Percy Shelley. Both wanted to reform the world’s climate by loosening the ice caps, but Shelley had the even more extreme idea of straightening Earth’s axis in the hope that all the world would enjoy a temperate climate. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

CHOICE

The excellent essays in the collection tend to explore the interface between nascent imperial formations and emergent understandings of how subjects and populations are linked around the globe

SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900