This list will seem noticeably familiar to many. And that appears to be the point. If there ever was a primal scene for Romanticism and theory, especially in the way it was staged within North America, the 1970s would be the name for it. Explicitly confronting or implicitly shadowboxing with that decade’s critical disposition still colors our critical endeavors more than forty years afterward, from New Historicism in the 1980s to contemporary interventions of the New Materialisms and the Affective Turn. That said, the periodizing use of the 1970s was for me a heuristic as much as anything else, a way to get a partial handle on the rhizomatic weave presented to anyone trying to parse intelligently the idea of listing the key texts for Romanticism and theory. The same goes for particularizing the narrative in terms of its North American settings—hence the inclusion of the 1974 U.S. publication of De La Grammatologie (1967) and the non-inclusion of Phillipe Lacoue-...
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1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998): originally published in 1958, a year after the launch of the Sputnik satellite, The Human Condition is, among many other things, a searching reflection on what the modern, experimental sciences--i.e., those that...
1. Marshall Brown, ‘Romanticism and Enlightenment’ in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. by Stuart Curran, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)