Radical Romanticism
Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Columbia University Press
Publishing:16th Sep '25
£30.00
This title is due to be published on 16th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Romanticism is often reduced to nostalgic pastoralism and solitary contemplation of the sublime. But a radical strand of Romantic writers and thinkers offered sweeping political, ecological, and religious critiques of capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, and environmental destruction. Interweaving canonical nineteenth-century authors with Black and Indigenous thinkers who transformed their work, this book is a bold new account of Romanticism for today’s deeply entrenched crises.
Mark S. Cladis examines the progressive democratic, religious, and environmental beliefs and practices that informed European Romantic literature and its sustained legacies in North America. His interpretation interweaves diverse voices such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Leslie Marmon Silko while also revealing the progressive visions of Romantic authors such as Rousseau, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Forging connections among literary and philosophical traditions while closely reading a wide range of texts, Radical Romanticism shows how storytelling is central to the pursuit of justice and flourishing for the human and the more-than-human worlds. Bringing together environmental humanities, literary theory, political theory, and religious studies, this book makes the case for a renewed radical Romanticism, offering urgent resources for a world beset by catastrophe, uncertainty, and despair.
In Radical Romanticism, Mark Cladis argues that Romanticism is not a dead aesthetic movement but an ongoing political and spiritual tradition. With compelling readings of William Wordsworth, W. E. B. Du Bois, Leslie Silko, and others, Cladis shows that radical Romantics sustain ecological, democratic life in diverse societies. This book is a creative contribution to ongoing scholarly conversations in literary studies, religious studies, political theory, and environmental humanities, and it suggests that literature can move people to action, transforming ecologies and spiritualities for a climate-changed world. -- Alda Balthrop-Lewis, author of Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism
Stories are all we have, says Leslie Marmon Silko, and landscapes are storied, too. In this important book, Indigeneity, race, and environment braid together to shape a radical Romanticism that is its own story—a way of life and a lens through which to reencounter vitalism and faith, drawing on Silko, Du Bois, Thoreau, and more. A brilliant text for all humanists now. -- Bonnie Honig, author of A Feminist Theory of Refusal
Cladis’s Radical Romanticism crackles with a bold new story about Romanticism, resisting the notion of the Romantic as a passive admirer of nature’s untouched beauty. For radical Romantics, nature’s uncertainty, beauty, and mystery fuel political, communal, and environmental justice. By building fresh bridges across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries—and among writers not often placed in conversation—Cladis offers a new public discourse for our planetary future. -- Jonathon Kahn, author of Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois
In Radical Romanticism, Mark Cladis offers an energetic new approach to the Romantic literary tradition, meticulously defining and exemplifying what radical Romanticism is, how it works stylistically in an impressively eclectic body of transatlantic and transhistorical literature, and why it matters to recognize this tradition. -- Scott Slovic, coeditor of Nature and Literary Studies
ISBN: 9780231213332
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
384 pages