About this Volume
Romanticism and Buddhism
This volume of Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes an editor's introduction by Mark Lussier, essays by Louise Economides, Timothy Morton, John Rudy, Dennis McCort, and a poem by Norman Dubie.
The genesis of this collection began with seemingly simple questions the editor asked of himself (and occasionally others), and the works appearing in this volume represent answers offered by insightful and engaged colleagues: "What's going on with Buddhism during the Romantic period? Can and should academic and spiritual practices be unified and interrelated, thereby helping heal an artificially conditioned alienation common within the increasingly corporate academy?" Each one of the essays in this volume argues in different yet interrelated ways for a shared view in Buddhism and Romanticism of forms of suffering created by the self and of the freedom from suffering found in self-annihilation. Emptiness resides in plenitude and solitude, the problematic path for Buddhists and Romanticists alike.
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The essays and other files were marked up in HTML by Lisa Rhody and Joseph Byrne at the University of Maryland. The volume cover/contents page was designed by Joseph Byrne. The cover image used with this volume is from a photograph taken of a stone carving at a Buddhist temple in western India.
About the Romantic Circles Praxis Series
The Romantic Circles Praxis Series is devoted to using computer technologies for the contemporary critical investigation of the languages, cultures, histories, and theories of Romanticism. Tracking the circulation of Romanticism within these interrelated domains of knowledge, RCPS recognizes as its conceptual terrain a world where Romanticism has, on the one hand, dissolved as a period and an idea into a plurality of discourses and, on the other, retained a vigorous, recognizable hold on the intellectual and theoretical discussions of today. RCPS is committed to mapping out this terrain with the best and mo st exciting critical writing of contemporary Romanticist scholarship.
About the Contributors
Mark Lussier is an Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University. His essays on William Blake have appeared in numerous journals, including 1650-1850, Arts Quarterly, New Orleans Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Romanticism on the Net, Southern Humanities Review, Studies in Romanticism, and Visible Language. His essay "Blake and Science Studies" recently appeared with Palgrave Advances: William Blake Studies, and other essays on Romanticism have appeared in Italian Culture, Romanticism on the Net, and The Wordsworth Circle. His most recent book, Romantic Dynamics: The Poetics of Physicality, was published by Macmillan/St. Martin's (1999), and his forthcoming book, Blake and Lacan, will appear later in 2007 from Peter Lang.
Louise Economides is currently working as an Assistant Professor at the University of Montana. In addition to British Romanticism, her research interests include Ecocriticism, Post-Structuralism, Systems Theory and Phenomenology. Her most recent publication is an article titled "Mont Blanc and the Sublimity of Materiality" which appeared in the Fall 2006 edition of Cultural Critique.
Timothy Morton is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard, 2007), The Poetics of Spice (Cambridge, 2000) and Shelley and the Revolution in Taste (Cambridge, 1994). He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Shelley (2006), Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism (Palgrave, 2004), and Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650-1830: From Revolution to Revolution (Cambridge, 2002). He is the author of about fifty essays on Romantic-period literature, food and ecology.
John Rudy is Professor of English at Indiana University Kokomo. He is the author of the following books: Wordsworth and the Zen Mind: The Poetry of Self-Emptying (SUNY, 1996), Emerson and Zen Buddhism (Mellen, 2001), and Romanticism and Zen Buddhism (Mellen, 2004). He has published articles in such journals as Massachusetts Studies in English, Renascence, SEL, Thought, and Eastern Buddhist. He is presently writing a book on Zen and literary experience.
Dennis McCort is professor of German and Comparative Literature at Syracuse University; he is the author of Going beyond the Pairs: The Coincidence of Opposites in German Romanticism, Zen, and Deconstruction (SUNY UP, 2001), and of studies on the Czech writer Franz Kafka.
Norman Dubie is a Regents and a Foundation Professor in Creative Writing in the English Department at Arizona State University, and is one of the premiere contemporary American poets. He has published eighteen volumes of poetry, including most recently The Mercy Seat and Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum, as well as having his poetry appear in every major venue for published poetry. He has been awarded numerous prestigious fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, and received numerous awards for his poetic work.
