Orrin N.C. Wang

Orrin Wang specializes in the study of both Romanticism and theory and is especially interested in how the two discourses converge. How that convergence speaks to the question of modernity is the focus of his first book, Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996). How that convergence is further expressed in Romantic and post-Romantic narratives of sensation and sobriety is the subject of his latest work, Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011), the winner of the 2011 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for the year's best book in Romanticism studies. Wang has written on such figures as P.B. Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Derrida, and Zizek and also teaches and studies the gothic. He is also the Series Editor of the award winning Romantic Circles Praxis Series. For a transcript of the words he spoke at Marshall Grossman's memorial, click here.