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"Radical Romanticism is an intellectual history of the progressive democratic, religious, and environmental beliefs and practices that informed 18th- and 19th-century European Romantic literature and their subsequent and sustained legacies in North America. The book argues that this tradition can assist in the ongoing project of cultivating democratic and environmental theory as both ideology to be critiqued and inheritance to be appropriated. The hallmarks of radical romanticism are not sublimity in all its natural and spiritual manifestations but the poignant human encounters and events that bring attention to experiences of war, empire, misogyny, white supremacy, environmental degradation, and oppressive political and religious institutions. It views the moral imagination as a powerful tool to transform worlds-worlds public and private, human and more-than-human. Among the surprising North American inheritors of radical romanticism is W.E.B. Du Bois, who in his account of the Chickasawhatchee swamp in Georgia considers the natural world not as pristine, untouched by humans, and ahistorical but rather as intimately and explicitly related to culture and history, more akin to Wordsworth's landscape in "The Ruined Cottage," unearthing the "untold stories" of the vulnerable poor. This comparison hints at the complexity of romanticism: its uncertain beginnings and endings, and its challenges to colonialism, capitalism, slavery, and the subjugation of women, on the one hand, and its escapist replacement for religion, complicit in genocide and other forms of domination of people and place, on the other. Mark Cladis juxtaposes Du Bois, Terry Tempest Williams, and Leslie Silko with Rousseau, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau to construct an engaged poetics and aesthetics deeply embedded in everyday life and informed by Du Bois' notion of "a dark, wild hope" rooted in suffering and grief and inspired by the struggle for religious, political, and environmental transformation"-- Provided by publisher.
About the author
Mark S. Cladis is the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where he is a faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies, the Center for Environmental Humanities, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative.
