This volume of Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes an editor's introduction by Laura Mandell, essays by Ron Broglio, Jay Clayton, Atara Stein, Ted Underwood. The volume also includes a forum entitled "Presentism vs. Archivalism in Research and the Classroom." The forum is introduced by Laura Mandell, and contributors include Phillip Barrish, Jon Klancher, Jerome McGann, David Simpson, and Gregory Tomso.

The original impetus for Romanticism and Contemporary Culture was a virtual conference hosted by Romantic Circles in its Villa Diodati MOO space. The log of the discussion, based on the essays of Clayton, Stein and Underwood included in this volume, is available at Romantic Circles, at its Virtual Conferences site.

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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 mo st exciting critical writing of contemporary Romanticist scholarship. The Romantic Circles Praxis Series was formerly known as Romantic Praxis: Theory and Criticism. The name was changed in November 1999.

About the Contributors

Phillip Barrish teaches American literature at the University of Texas at Austin. His American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige 1880-1995, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2001.
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Ron Broglio is a Brittain Fellow at Georgia Tech. He is currently working on a book entitled Landscape Technologies: British Landscape 1740-1830. As Associate Editor of Romantic Circles he works on the relationship between digital technology and Romantic writing as realized in RC's Villa Diodati MOO and forthcoming new media projects.
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Jay Clayton is Professor of English literature at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Romantic Vision and the Novel and The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory. He has recently completed a book manuscript entitled Charles Dickens in Cyberspace, Or, Literature in an Age of Cultural Studies.
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Michael Eberle-Sinatra (Volume Co-Editor) is Assistant Professor of Nineteenth-Century British Literature at the University of Montreal. He is the founding editor of Romanticism On the Net, the editor, with Laura Mandell, of the Features & Events page of Romantic Circles, and the general editor, with Thomas C. Crochunis, of the British Women Playwrights around 1800 project. He has edited a collection of essays on Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley's Fictions: From Frankenstein to Faulkner (Macmillan, 2000), and has published several articles on Coleridge, Wagner, Leigh Hunt, and Percy and Mary Shelley. He is also the general editor, with Robert Morrison, of The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt (forthcoming from Pickering & Chatto, 2002).

Jon Klancher teaches nineteenth century literature and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University. He is author of The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (1987) and has published essays on nineteenth-century popular writing, the political history of Romantic criticism, genre, Coleridge, Godwin, and other figures in ELH, Studies in Romanticism, MLQ, and other journals. He has also edited a collection of articles, "Romanticism and Its Publics: A Forum," for SiR. Among awards, he has held Guggenheim, NEH, and Mellon fellowships.
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Laura Mandell (Volume Co-Editor) is Associate Professor of English at Miami University. Her research interests span the eighteenth century and British Romantic period, as does her first book, Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999). She is co-editor of The Romantic Chronology and of several sections of Romantic Circles: The Anthologies Page, The Features Page, and The Pedagogy Page.
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Jerome McGann, whose continuing work on the Internet is currently featured at Romantic Circles, first became notorious for publication of The Romantic Ideology in 1983, which famously questions the ideological investments of literary criticism. McGann has long been a talented interpreter of the ideologies informing textual dissemination based on the material conditions of reproduction. He shows definitively, in his new book Radiant Textuality, how the historical conditions of production and consumption have affected reception history. McGann has been well placed to make sense of "the famous proverb that . . . define[s] the coming of the digital age . . . : The Medium is the Message."
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David Simpson has spent his career grappling with the degree to which Romantic writers attempt to make authoritative pronouncements about history, beginning with his first full-length book, Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (1979), up through and including his two books about Wordsworth (Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real [1982]; Wordsworth's Historical Imagination: The Poetry Of Displacement [1987]). Simpson's recent work questions the political efficacy of cultural studies, of what he calls in the title of his important book, The Academic Postmodern.
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Atara Stein is an associate professor at Cal State University, Fullerton. She has recently completed a book-length manuscript on the Byronic hero in popular culture and also teaches a graduate seminar on the topic.
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Gregory Tomso received his Ph.D. in English from Duke University in December, 2001. He is currently teaching at Ithaca College in upstate New York.
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Ted Underwood is assistant professor of English at Colby College. His articles have appeared in PMLA, Modern Language Quarterly, and Studies in Romanticism.
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