Praxis Series

Romantic Circles Praxis (ISSN: 1528-8129) is a series of peer-reviewed critical volumes devoted to the field of Romanticism and its theoretical underpinnings. Closer in form to a scholarly book of essays than a critical journal, each volume in Romantic Circles Praxis Series (RCPS) explores a particular subject, figure, or theoretical approach, such as the gothic, contemporary culture, discourses of empire, and many others.

Section Editors: Orrin N.C. Wang & Brian McGrath



Romantic Poetics of Public Feeling | December 2021

What does it feel like to be (or not to be) attached to a country or community, to have (or not to have) membership or citizenship, in ways that one cannot control? This volume will turn to Romantic poetics to consider how public feelings operate and circulate through the language of poetry. How does poetry mediate the politics and sociality of feeling? How can poetry register not just a solitary, recollected overflow of powerful feeling but also a communal or contagious one? We have gathered a selection of essays that bring together in new configurations the study of poetics, affect, and politics for the field of Romanticism. In response to Lauren Berlant’s suggestion that “public spheres are affect worlds at least as much as they are effects of rationality and rationalization,” how might poetry provide a different kind of understanding of the publics and counterpublics teeming within our public sphere? In a critical tradition that has already—as Mary Favret has shown—increasingly revealed “the intractably social and material bases for romantic esthetics and the poets’ deep awareness of this dependency” (“Study of Affect and Romanticism,” 1163), we mean to pursue more explicitly questions of amorphous political urgency that emerge in an unfolding historical present (whether “then,” “now,” or curiously both). Just like any other domain of culture, Romantic poetry is rife or riven with feeling. But how might we recognize its feelings as tuned in to the political, as public? How might poetic figure or form alter our conception of the feelings that both compose and decompose the individual—the feelings that mark both our alienation from others and our attachments?

Raymond Williams and Romanticism | November 2020
This volume considers the place of Romantic works and the Romantic period itself in the work of one of the most important twentieth-century theorists of culture, Raymond Williams. After an introduction that pays particular attention to central concepts passed down from Williams like “structure of feeling” and “cultural formation,” these essays revisit Williams over thirty years after his death to reconsider his bearing on particular Romantic authors or broader sociohistorical processes in order to ask how his work helps us ask questions about the contemporary university and the place of the humanities within it.

The Sundry Faces of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Literature | November 2020

Nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish literature engages a wide range of thematic and aesthetic preoccupations.  This volume brings together several essays that highlight such breadth, even as the essays converge upon several questions that recur consistently throughout this literature:  what does it mean to advertise one’s subjectivity, especially where the expression of such subjectivity is inflected by aesthetic and formalist concerns that are historically connected to English nationalism? Such questions are especially relevant when considered alongside the historical context:  Jews in England did not achieve political emancipation until 1858, and they were widely regarded as racially other for much of the century.  Jewish writers do not answer such questions with one voice; however, their political and cultural contexts put pressure on their aesthetic choices, and we explore these choices in the essays that follow.

Keats in Popular Culture | September 2020
Keats in Popular Culture posits Keats’s two-hundred year reception history as an exemplary case for examining popular culture as a generative, shape-shifting borderland where liking/loving and responding to literature intermingles, sometimes indistinguishably, the tastes of the people and the elite. This collection of essays recalls three longstanding embarrassments for teachers and scholars of literary history—popular culture, media, and affect—which routinely have been defined in opposition to (while continuing to inform) the high canon of English literature. These essays aim to: 1) spotlight the positive affinity, and not antithesis, between Keats and popular culture in our time and his own; 2) examine Keats’s afterlives in multi-media creations involving authorial fashioning and participatory poetics; 3) posit what we might learn through such creations about how to read, view, and hear Keats in a growing new literary middlebrow culture; and 4) prompt reflections on how we as teachers and scholars can connect with broader mass audiences interested in Keats.

Latin American Afterlives | July 2020
This volume investigates the afterlives of British Romantic poets in the Hispanophone world with an emphasis on Latin American authors. Reframing the outdated model of a European center and a New World periphery, we ask the following questions: To what extent has translation shaped or impeded the dissemination of otherwise global Romantic texts throughout countries like Argentina, Cuba, Colombia, and Venezuela? How do Latin American reinterpretations of Romantic texts assume or elide the colonial burdens of influence from English works, as compared to those imposed by continental Spanish texts? How do Latin American writers negotiate their position in relation to a European literary and cultural canon? And in what ways do these Anglo-Latino interactions differ from those recently explored in transatlantic studies, of North America, the West Indies and the Black Atlantic?

Mary Wollstonecraft Even Now | October 2019
This volume attests to the continuing relevance of Mary Wollstonecraft to twenty-first century feminist thought. Making connections between Wollstonecraft's efforts to think within and beyond Enlightenment principles of liberal humanism and various significant issues and debates in contemporary culture from the impacts of social media to the impasses in theories (and practices) of social justice, the essays collectively address questions about what counts as feminism(s) now. Mary Wollstonecraft Even Now explores the range of concerns its contributors take up in considering the feminist afterlives of Wollstonecraft’s controversial writings and ideas.

The Futures of Shelley's Triumph | October 2019
Ever since Paul de Man’s "Shelley Disfigured," we have come to see Percy Shelley’s final, unfinished poem, The Triumph of Life, as a symptom of the end of Romanticism and Romanticism as end. If or once things are over, why bother to re-visit the end? This is one of many questions Shelley’s poem compels its readers to ask, which is in turn to ask why we any longer need to re-visit the poem at this a time when so little apparently rests on our doing so. So, as if to prolong the idea of an end (whatever that might be), this volume is comprised of four essays compelled to return to the same poem, as if to read the poem as a crime scene that leaves a barrage of clues, none of them adding up to a crime, but each lingering differently with Shelley as Shelley lingers with life and history and as we linger (or not) with the shadows his future casts (or not) upon our present moment, which seems more than ever beyond our grasp, if it ever was within our ken. Why even bother? But then again, and just in case: if so little and so much is at stake, why not?

On the 200th Anniversary of Lord Byron's Manfred: Commemorative Essays | June 2019
In commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Manfred: A Dramatic Poem (1817) and based on original talks given at an international symposium at New York University on April 21, 2017, this special Romantic Circles Praxis volume offers not only a collection of essays that reassesses Lord Byron’s drama from an array of angles but also recent artistic adaptations of the script and an audio recording of a reenacted musical scene from the 1834 London production of Manfred. Among the subjects addressed in these essays are the play’s dramaturgical and staging potential, the curious history of its publication, circulation, and reception, and the authorial intent of a work based on Byron’s scandalous life. The readings also revisit the complexities behind Manfred’s hybrid genre, while expanding the range of cultural influences and source materials that have previously been associated with the play. With Manfred Byron created a work that fused his own celebrity myth with elements from various cultures, faiths, myths, epochs, genres, and traditions. Byron fired the public imagination with a drama that, in pushing well beyond its rootedness in a Swiss landscape and in his own biography, transcends the limits of the personal and the local as an eccentric and eclectic work of global horizons.

Romanticism and Affect Studies | May 2018
This volume presents new work by scholars working at the intersection of British Romanticism and affect studies. Each essay takes a different approach to affect and emotion, from a piece on Joanna Baillie’s passion plays, co-written by a literary scholar and a cognitive psychologist, to a piece that utilizes affect theory and rhythmic studies in a reading of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This volume does not propose a single definition of “affect,” but all of the essays share the conviction that the kind of interdisciplinary work demanded by affect studies is beneficial to both Romantic studies and affect studies. Much more than a passing trend, affect studies has transformed the study of emotion for a generation of scholars.

Romanticism and the Rights of the Negative | June 2017

This collection thinks the “rights” of the negative against the more common association of the term “rights” with human rights and rights that can be posited. Such rights, despite their seeming liberalism, produce a normative notion of the person which is in the end biopolitical, and moreover, in assuming that rights can always be posited, they assume the primacy of the public sphere. The essays in this collection all resist the current emphasis on the public sphere that has resulted from the absorption of “Romanticism” into the “Nineteenth Century,” and focus instead on Romanticism as a retreat from publication, publicity and consensus. Whether this retreat is absolute negation or a withdrawal that holds something in reserve is a question left open in the spaces between these six essays on Godwin, Charlotte Smith, Coleridge and Goya.

The Prose of Romanticism | February 2017

Is Romantic prose a neutral instrument of representation? Does it struggle to engage questions of experience and sensation in new ways? How should prose be understood in relation to poetic expressiveness? The essays in this volume explore Romantic prose across multiple genres as a kind of performative utterance that redraws the boundaries between the private and the social.

New Work on German Romanticism | December 2016
“What’s new with German Romanticism?” – the question gestures to the important contribution of German-language writing to our understanding of the period but also to the trenchant and suggestive interrogation of the category of “newness” by German Romantic writers. The essays in this collection represent some of the most important current trends in scholarship, but each also grapples in some way or another with the challenges that the literary, philosophical, scientific, and legal writings of Romanticism pose to received narratives about history, meaning, and power, including narratives about originality and newness, revolutionary breaks and fresh beginnings.

English Romanticism in East Asia | December 2016
This volume brings together essays from Japan, China, Taiwan, and Korea to offer an unprecedented view of English Romanticism’s presence in the modern literature and literary criticism of East Asia. Going beyond simply tracing the influence of English Romantic writing on East Asian writers and critics, each essay reveals an intrinsic and often surprising interconnectedness in the Romantic aesthetics and mode of thought across the borders of East and West. This collection’s reflection on English Romanticism through the historical particularities of East Asian nations at the onset of modernity sheds light on Romanticism as a still valid form of cultural critique against the shared yet divergent forms, experiences, and questions of modernity.

Multi-Media Romanticisms | November 2016
This volume explores the multiplicity of the media concept during the Romantic age in England. The collection's central investigations include: the multiplicity of Romantic-era media technologies and theories; the conceptual models of network, assemblage, and ecology used by contemporary scholars to map the relations between media; Romantic valorizations of noise as a benign register of materiality, singularity, and finitude; and the turn to questions of affect and emotion as a way to describe the position of the subject within extended networks of mediation. Volume contributors reflect on the interactions among the diverse media forms of the Romantic age and explore the connections between those old media forms and today’s dynamic new media ecologies.

Minimal Romanticism | May 2016
What might romantic minimality and brevity suggest as alternative additions to our critical vocabulary in romantic studies? How do they allow us to think differently—and briefly—about a constellation of questions and perspectives that throw into relief the necessity to think through the small, negligent, obscure, too little or too much, the ephemeral, the mere there is, the all but not there? The authors of the position papers collected for this issue were each asked to respond to just these kinds of prompts, and to keep their arguments operatively brief. Conciseness and intensification in service of our theme of brevity and minimality was the order of the day. The space between stanzas, like the disappearance of a ruin into history, became equal considerations for reflecting on the brevity of things that the larger “life” of romanticism cannot ever ignore.

Romantic Systems | March 2016
The essays in this volume probe the way that Romantic writers explored the limits and possibilities of thinking in terms of systems. The purpose of the collection is not to provide a single perspective adopted by Romantic authors, any more than it is to provide a single theoretical perspective with which to view those authors. Instead, the essays collectively convey a sense that Romantic writers viewed systems with a distinctive mixture of skepticism, anxiety, and enthusiasm.

Percy Shelley and the Delimitation of the Gothic | November 2015

This volume of five essays focus on how the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley uses and modifies Gothic conventions across his whole writing career so as, on the one hand, to extend the limits of the Gothic, shading it into a wider Romanticism, and, on the other, to press the limits of the Gothic down to their most basic foundations, releasing new potentials. These essays all argue in different way that, by the end of his career, Shelley has proposed an answer to the question: what does Gothic writing most basically assume in its mixtures of previous genres, and how do these assumptions both establish its limits and set the stage for transgressing them?

The Politics of Shelley: History, Theory, Form | October 2015
This volume takes as its starting point a 2001 volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series, Reading Shelley’s Interventionist Poetry, 1819-1820, in which volume-editor Michael Scrivener, employing Theodor Adorno's terminology, interrogates a potential binary in our understanding of Shelley's "interventionist" work: the "antinomy of commitment and autonomy." Asking what it means for a work of art to intervene in its immediate political context, the present volume asserts the necessity of seeing through and beyond the antinomy of political commitment and artistic autonomy by rereading and reimagining the political in Shelley’s writings and his legacy. Indeed, the essays in this volume chart new political possibilities in our estimation of Shelley’s body of work—pathways that take us back to post-Peterloo repression through to the Victorian Shelleyans, and then forward to Jacques Rancière’s post-Marxism.

Romantic Materialities | February 2015
The six essays collected here suggest that Romanticism exposes us to a materialism that cannot merely be overcome and an idealism with which it is not identical. By reading beyond the texts conventionally associated with Romanticism, and by recasting the critical tendencies–from thing theory to object oriented ontology–through the poets, genres, and critics of Romanticism, these essays position Romanticism (and show how Romanticism may always have been positioned) in another relation to things as they are–or may be.

Visuality's Romantic Genealogies | December 2014
This volume is dedicated to both excavating the Romantic genealogies of visuality and charting directions for the ways in which the study of Romantic visual culture may redraw the geographic, temporal, and disciplinary bounds of Romanticism, bringing diverse, and in some instances new, objects and their ethical, political, and aesthetic stakes into view. The essays investigate three broad inquiries: 1) technologies of vision and objectivity’s slippages; 2) the indigenous or transplanted fruits of visuality’s New World Genealogies and 3) the role of proto-photography, panopticism, and slavery in the spectral formation of Romantic visuality. Emphasizing the ways we interpret visuality in romantic culture, the volume invites reconsideration of media, practices, and discourses that would seem to belong to earlier and later periods—from the artifacts and modes of viewing attached to curiosity and to technologies and ways of imaging and imagining that have become aligned with photography and the digital. The volume includes an editor's introduction by Theresa M. Kelley and Jill H. Casid, with essays by Sophie Thomas, Marcus Wood, Matthew Francis Rarey, Kay Dian Kriz, and Lucy Kamiko Hawkinson Traverse.

Tragedy, Translation and Theory: In Honor of Thomas J. McCall | October 2014
This issue takes its inspiration from the writings on translation, tragedy and twentieth-century literary theory in the work of the late Romanticist and comparatist Tom McCall, who died suddenly in January 2011. Three noted Romanticists and literary theorists, taking off from specific critical essays by McCall, explore the centrality of Greek tragedy as it emerges in Romantic writing (especially that of Friedrich Hölderlin), for philosophy, literature, and literary theory. Passing between the Greek and the German (notably in Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles), and between the literary and the philosophical, these papers offer new and original insights into the complex ways in which Romantic writing was bound to the translation and interpretation of Greek writing and the unique manner in which twentienth-century literary theory emerged from the Romantic reflection on the relation between language and the emergence (and suspension) of thought. Edited and introduced by Cathy Caruth, with essays by Cathy Caruth, Ian Balfour, David S. Ferris, and three contributions from Tom McCall (1 |2 |3).

Stanley Cavell and the Event of Romanticism | July 2014
The American philosopher Stanley Cavell arrives at the striking conclusion that “romanticism opens with the discovery of the problem of other minds, or with the discovery that the other is a problem, an opening of philosophy.” Cavell’s account of how Romanticism opens is not historical in orientation, but rather offers a rich conceptual, aesthetic, and ethical site of concern that both interrupts and generates his life’s work—thus presenting an opening for scholars and students of the Romantic period to think the subject of Romanticism anew in studying (with) Cavell. The present collection—with essays (in suggested reading order) by Emily Sun, Paul Fry, Eric Lindstrom, Eric Walker, and Anne-Lise François, and a substantial Afterword by Joshua Wilner—hinges between the efforts to record Cavell’s engagement with British Romantic texts and to stage new interventions.

Romantic Antiquarianism | June 2014
Featuring essays by leading art historians, literary scholars, and historians of antiquarianism, this volume sheds new light on Romanticism's material and visual cultures. Romantic Antiquarianism reveals the important role that antiquarian discourses and practices played in shaping neoclassicism, the sublime, and other major concepts of the Romantic period. Edited and introduced by Noah Heringman and Crystal B. Lake, with essays by Martin Myrone, Jonathan Sachs, Thora Brylowe, Rosemary Hill, Timothy Campbell, Ina Ferris, & Sam Smiles, and a response by Jonah Siegel.

An Interview with Anne Mellor | January 2014
In the interview that comprises this volume, Anne Mellor recounts her determined commitment to rethinking Romanticism through the lens of gender. On the eve of retirement, Mellor continues to query our assumptions and preoccupations as Romanticists, even as she looks back on her long career. The audio clips attached to the transcription resonate with Mellor’s intellectual curiosity, as her voice continues to prompt the reader to return to the texts, the archives, and the critical concerns of Feminist Romanticism. Roxanne Eberle introduces the volume and conducts the interview.

Romantic Numbers | April 2013
The six essays in this volume offer a range of mediations prompted by the volume’s title. This volume explores older and newer logics of “matching” and “counting” and “measuring” (whether statistical, geometric, or otherwise un/calculable); they register as well an upsurge in interest in formal-language, neurocognitive and medial-historical approaches. These essays invite us to think “bodies,” “multitudes,” and “subjectivity” along different axes. They ask us to think about the (romantic) one, the (romantic) proper name, quantity, and quality; they invite us to reflect on the status of poetry and measure, about the work of the novel as totalization, about models of mind, about calculuses of populations and food. Ranging through Wordsworth, Scott, Malthus, Babbage, and Galt (among others), this volume points to new directions in romanticist thinking while reconstructing the complexity of romantic-period thought. Edited and introduced by Maureen N. McLane, with essays by Matthew F. Wickman, Marjorie Levinson, James Brooke-Smith, John Savarese, Bo Earle, and Ron Broglio, along with two responses by Maureen N. McLane: Response #1, Response #2.

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