About this volume

About this volume

This volume of Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes essays by Maureen McLane, Matthew F. Wickman, Marjorie Levinson, James Brooke-Smith, John Savarese, Bo Earle, and Ron Broglio.

The six essays in this volume offer a range of mediations prompted by the volume’s title. These essays explore 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.

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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 most exciting critical writing of contemporary Romanticist scholarship.

About the Contributors

Maureen McLane, Associate Professor at NYU, is the author of Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2008), Romanticism and the Human Sciences (CUP, 2000, 2006); she is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry (2008). A poet and essayist, she has published three books with FSG: World Enough: poems (2010), Same Life (2008), and My Poets (2012), an experimental hybrid of criticism and memoir, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography. Her third book of poems, This Blue, will be published in 2014.

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[go to Response #1]

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Matthew F. Wickman is Founding Director of the BYU Humanities Center and Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University, Utah. He is the author of The Ruins of Experience (2007) and is currently completing a book on intersections between literature and mathematics in the long eighteenth century.

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Marjorie Levinson is F.L. Huetwell Professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of several books on Romantic period writers and topics, and of articles on modern poetry and critical theory. She is currently preparing a collection of her essays for publication, titled Field Theories of Form.

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James Brooke-Smith is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Ottawa. He has published articles in Configurations and Literature Compass on Romantic literature, media studies, and the history of science and technology. He is currently at work on a book, Romantic Pedagogies: Education and Media in Great Britain, 1780-1830, which studies the role of the multi-media classroom in Romantic print culture.

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John Savarese is a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. In Fall 2013 he will begin as an ACLS New Faculty Fellow in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently at work on a book about poetic theory, philosophy of mind, and embodied experience in the Romantic era.

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Bo Earle is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is currently at work on a book titled Post-Personal Romanticism.

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Ron Broglio is an associate professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University and Senior Scholar at the university’s Global Institute of Sustainability. He is author of Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art in the University of Minnesota Press’s Posthumanities Series and author of Technologies of the Picturesque.

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