Praxis Series

Romantic Circles Praxis (ISSN: 1528-8129) is a series of peer-reviewed critical volumes devoted to the field of Romanticism and its theoretical underpinnings. Closer in form to a scholarly book of essays than a critical journal, each volume in Romantic Circles Praxis Series (RCPS) explores a particular subject, figure, or theoretical approach, such as the gothic, contemporary culture, discourses of empire, and many others.

Section Editors: Orrin N.C. Wang & Brian McGrath



Romanticism and Biopolitics | December 2012
This collection of articles is intended to initiate a conversation about and between biopolitics and romanticism. Its broad contention is that the study of biopolitics reanimates the question of romanticism in two senses. First, the set of conceptual resources provided in recent work on biopolitics opens up inventive lines of inquiry that enable scholars to re-think the already established awareness that the literature, philosophy, and culture of romanticism displays an obsession with life. In another sense biopolitics reanimates romanticism insofar as the current scholarly concern with life as an object of power marks the radical survival of romanticism. If romanticism responds well when examined in the light of contemporary biopolitical theory, then a constitutive part of this response is a certain resistance to biopolitical theory. The contributors to this volume demonstrate that the biopolitical intervention on life engages paradoxes, predicaments, and aporias that have been widely or fully appreciated neither by theorists of biopolitics nor by critics who take up their work. Romanticism, we suggest, is a privileged locus for the awareness that even the most assured representation of life turns upon an irreducible “literariness.” Edited and introduced by Alastair Hunt and Matthias Rudolf, with essays by Marc Redfield, Emily Sun, and Sara Guyer, along with a response by Eva Geulen.

Romanticism, Forgery and the Credit Crunch | February 2012
The aim of this volume is to explore the Romantic credit crisis of 1797-1821. The decision to end cash payments and flood the economy with low denominational banknotes led to a spectacular increase in executions for banknote forgery. Many Romantic writers saw this bloody debacle as a sensational illustration of the dangers of an economic system based on mere "paper" value. While some critical attention has been given to the cultural history of credit (Brantlinger, Poovey), the issue of forgery has been overlooked. Yet, as the essays in this volume show, the impact of the credit crisis and its thousands of victims affected literature, journalism and art in often profound ways. Ian Haywood edits and contributes to the volume, along with Robert Miles, Alex Benchimol, Alex J. Dick, and Nick Groom.

Robert Bloomfield: The Inestimable Blessing of Letters | January 2012
Robert Bloomfield's letters document one artist’s struggles (and sometimes his victories) to share his unique voice and vision; the online publication of his extant letters (a companion to this collection of essays) reveals new and exciting insights into Bloomfield the artist and the man. The essays included in this collection highlight and draw attention to aspects of Bloomfield's literary production that would likely not be possible without the full access to his letters that the edition provides, and make a strong case for why Bloomfield continues to be worthy of study. They suggest how much more remains to be said about this prolific poet. This volume is edited and introduced by John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, with essays by Tim Fulford, Peter Denney, Ian Haywood, and Bridget Keegan.

Romanticism and Disaster | January 2012
Romanticism and Disaster considers and responds to the timely concept of devastated life by thinking about how the capacity to read, interpret, and absorb disaster necessitates significant changes in theory, ethics, and common life. What if the consequences or "experience" of a disaster were less about psychic survival than an unblinking desire to face down the disaster as a challenge to normative structures? The essays in this volume attend to the rhetorical, epistemological, political, and social effects of romantic critique, and reflect on how processes of destruction and reconstitution, ruination and survival, are part and parcel of romanticism's grappling with a negativity that haunts its corners. Put in this way, "disaster" does not signal a referential event, but rather an undoing of certain apparently prior categories of dwelling, and forces us to contemplate living otherwise. In confronting the end of things, what are the conditions or possibilities of existence amidst catastrophe? What is a crisis, and what kinds of challenges does it occasion? What can be philosophically gained or lost by analyzing disaster in its multiple sites, contexts, and instances? This volume is edited and introduced by Jacques Khalip and David Collings, with essays by Scott J. Juengel, William Keach, Timothy Morton, and Rei Terada.

Circulations: Romanticism and the Black Atlantic | October 2011
This Romantic Circles Praxis Volume moves the perspective of critical inquiry into British Romanticism from the Island (England) to the Islands (West Indies), considering the particular significance of the Atlantic—watery vortex of myriad economic and cultural exchanges, roaring multiplicity of agencies, and vast whirlpool of creative powers. Black Romanticism remembers a forgotten ancestry of British culture, recovering the vital agencies of diasporic Africans and creole cultures of the West Indies. It does so by practicing counter-literacy, reading the works of nation, empire, and colony against themselves to liberate the common cultures they occlude. The five essays presented here examine texts by or about Jean Jacque Dessalines, Juan Manzano, Jack Mansong, Mary Prince, and John Gabriel Stedman, following a circuitous route that begins in Africa and travels from Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, Suriname, Bermuda, and Antigua to corresponding points in England, America, and the continent. The circulation of radically different adaptations of the “same” material provides new ways to understand the colonial Caribbean. This volume is edited and introduced by Paul Youngquist and Frances Botkin, with essays by Lindsay J. Twa, Lissette Lopez Szwydky, Joselyn Almeida, Dustin Kennedy, and Michele Speitz.

John Thelwall: Critical Reassessments | September 2011
Capitalizing on the conjunction of renewed scholarly interest in Thelwall and new archival finds, this collection of essays addresses the central question of the coherence and continuity of Thelwall's diverse pursuits—literary, political, scientific, therapeutic, elocutionary, and journalistic—across the four decades of his career (c. 1790-1830), and provides new insight into Thelwall's eclipse and persistence in the nineteenth century. The volume includes an introduction by Yasmin Solomonescu and essays by Nicholas Roe, Mary Fairclough, Molly Desjardins, Emily Stanback, Steve Poole, Angela Esterhammer, and Patty O'Boyle.

Romantic Frictions | September 2011
The essays in Romantic Frictions find in Romanticism what philosophical modernity has often found there: a disposition to recognize oppositions that cannot be squared or resolved precisely because they constitute the ongoing work of culture and writing. Such frictions are embedded in a shifting temporal moment whose inner complexity is similarly textured such that neither history nor philosophy assumes a master (and fictional) disguise. Both are instead crosscut and assembled in ways that sustain an inner friction that invites being read. Rather than reify the critical tendency, stubbornly at issue since the 1980s, to suppose that Romanticism belongs either to deconstructive philosophy or to new historicism, the essays in this volume understand romanticism as a cultural and literary terrain where these and other disciplinary affiliations exist together, not as easy companions but as productive antagonists. This volume is edited and introduced by Theresa M. Kelley, with essays by Ian Duncan, Mary A. Favret, Daniel O'Quinn, Matthew Rowlinson, Colin Jager, and Jacques Khalip.

Romantic Fandom | April 2011
Romantic-era fans collected autographs, souvenirs, portraits and relics of celebrity writers, artists, performers and athletes; pored over gossip-filled periodicals and newspaper notices; imitated celebrities' fashion statements; fantasized about becoming friends or lovers with celebrities; got caught up in "crazes" for persons and texts; created fan fiction, wrote fan mail and formed communities of like-minded devotees. Analyzing fan practices across a range of cultural contexts, the essays in this volume will explore how the concept of "fandom" can help us make sense of the role of various audiences in the cultural activity and cultural productions of the Romantic period. The volume includes an introduction by Eric Eisner and essays by Nicola J. Watson, Clara Tuite, Mark Schoenfield, and David A. Brewer.

Editing And Reading Blake | September 2010
This volume looks at the profound challenges William Blake poses to both editors and readers. Despite the promises of the current multi-modal environment, the effort to represent Blake's works as he intended them to be read is increasingly being recognized as an editorial fantasy. All editorial work necessitates mediation and misrepresentation. Yet editorial work also illuminates much in Blake's corpus, and more remains to be done. The essays in this volume grapple with past, present, and future attempts at editing Blake's idiosyncratic verbal and visual work for a wide variety of audiences who will read Blake using numerous forms of media. This volume is edited by Wayne C. Ripley and Justin Van Kleeck. It includes an editor's introduction by Wayne C. Ripley, with essays by David Fuller, W. H. Stevenson, Mary Lynn Johnson, Rachel Lee and J. Alexandra McGhee, Justin Van Kleeck, and Wayne C. Ripley.

The Sublime and Education | August 2010
This volume offers a series of essays in which contributors meditate on how the concept of education intersects with sublime theory and Romantic aesthetics more generally. Broadly speaking, this volume produces a set of revisionary readings rooted in the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and its place in our ongoing understanding of Romantic aesthetics and sublime theory. An underlying inspiration of this volume is the pedagogical theory of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who has thought widely about humanities-based training using Romantic-era texts as principal theoretical and literary tools, formative among them the aesthetic philosophy of Kant. This volume is edited and introduced by J. Jennifer Jones, with essays by Christopher Braider, Frances Ferguson, Paul Hamilton, Anne C. McCarthy, Forest Pyle, Deborah Elise White, and an afterword by Ian Balfour.

Romantic Psyche and Psychoanalysis | December 2008
This volume offers a series of shifting perspectives on the emergence of psychoanalysis and a psychoanalytical consciousness in early and later British and German Romantic poetry, fiction, philosophy, and science. Rather than read psychoanalysis as one of Romanticism's inevitable outcomes, this volume reads for what remains unthought between Romantic thought and contemporary theory and criticism about Romanticism and psychoanalysis. The papers herein map versions of a psychoanalysis avant la lettre, but more crucially these essays imagine how psychoanalysis before Freud thinks itself differently, as well as anticipating and staging its later concerns, theorizations, and institutionalizations. Together they offer what might be called the profoundly psychosomatic matrix within which the specters of modern subjectivity materialize themselves. This volume is edited and introduced by Joel Faflak, with essays by Matt ffytche, Ildiko Csengei, Julie Carlson, Mary Jacobus, Ross Woodman, and Tilottama Rajan.

Secularism, Cosmopolitanism, and Romanticism | August 2008
This volume begins to unpack the relationships among the three terms of its title. Despite its air of neutrality, "secularism" is increasingly understood to have its own interests, particularly when it comes to defining and managing the "religious." And, thanks to its constitutive relationship to modernity, romanticism is invested in secularism, not least in those moments typically coded as "spiritual" or "religious." Cosmopolitanism, too, bears a vexed relationship to a period typically associated with nationalism. Finally, secularism and cosmopolitanism are themselves related in surprising ways, both historically and conceptually. Do they pursue the same project? Do they diverge? How and when? And how does romantic writing figure such alignments? These are the questions motivating the three essays in this volume. This volume is edited and introduced by Colin Jager, with essays by Mark Canuel, Colin Jager, Paul Hamilton, and an afterword by Bruce Robbins.

Utopianism and Joanna Baillie | July 2008
This volume contextualizes work by and work about Joanna Baillie with respect to revisionist thinking about utopianism. Since utopianism has become a positively valued concept within sociological, legal, and other fields, its implications for an understanding of Baillie's approach to social change/social problems, as well as for an understanding of scholarship recovering Baillie for contemporary purposes, deserve to be explored. This volume is edited and introduced by Regina Hewitt, with essays by Thomas McLean, Robert C. Hale, William D. Brewer, Marjean D. Purinton, and Regina Hewitt.

Philosophy and Culture | June 2008
This volume addresses a perceived opposition between philosophy and critical theory on the one hand, and culture or cultural studies on the other. It seeks to revalidate critical work that develops a philosophy of culture and a culturally historical philosophy. This volume is edited and introduced by Rei Terada, with essays by Manu Chander, Ted Underwood, Thomas Pfau, J. Hillis Miller, and Daniel Tiffany.

“Soundings of Things Done”: The Poetry and Poetics of Sound in the Romantic Ear and Era | April 2008
This forum attends to the sounding sense of Romantic poetry, both thematically (a poetics of sound) and sensually/phonically (the poetry of sound and the sound of poetry). This volume is edited and introduced by Susan J. Wolfson, with essays by Susan J. Wolfson, James Chandler, Garrett Stewart, and Adam Potkay.

Romanticism and the New Deleuze | January 2008
This volume summarizes and utilizes the arc of Gilles Deleuze's work while turning it towards Romantic writers, providing a thoughtful intervention in Romantic criticism, opening up new terrain on travel, the sublime, and the revolutionary. This volume is edited by Ron Broglio, with an introduction by Robert Mitchell and Ron Broglio, and essays by Robert Mitchell, Ron Broglio, David Baulch, and David Collings.

Romanticism and Buddhism | February 2007
This volume explores intersections between Western thinking and Eastern religion. Each essay re-examines Romantic-era work in light of the "guides and basic principles" of Buddhist thought. Edited and introduction by Mark Lussier, essays by Louise Economides, Timothy Morton, John Rudy, Dennis McCort, and a poem by Norman Dubie.

Romantic Gastronomies | January 2007
This volume suggests the myriad ways in which the surprisingly neglected (and critically undigested) Romantic culture of gastronomy influenced artistic production of nineteenth-century Britain and France-at the same time as it raised new philosophical challenges. Edited and introduction by Denise Gigante, this volume includes essays by Carolyn Korsmeyer, Joshua Wilner, and Michael Garval.

Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism | November 2006
The essays in this volume move beyond the notation of literary influence or ideological parallelism to perform a functional taxonomy of transatlantic Romanticism, helping to explain why the movement developed at different times and rates in different places around the Atlantic. Edited by Lance Newman, Joel Pace and Chris Koenig-Woodyard, this volume includes essays by Joselyn Almeida, Jen Camden, Andre Cardoso, James Crane, Sarah Ferguson-Wagstaffe, Scott Harshbarger, Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, Sohui Lee, and Cree LeFavour.

Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom: Two Interviews | July 2006
This volume includes a pair of wide-ranging conversations, one between Geoffrey Hartman and Marc Redfield and the other between Harold Bloom and Laura Quinney. While differing in tone, setting, and topics, both conversations reaffirm the centrality of Hartman and Bloom in any history of the study of Romanticism for the last half century. Edited by Orrin Wang.

Romanticism and Patriotism: Nation, Empire, Bodies, Rhetoric | May 2006
The current cretinization of public, political language is often viewed as synonomous with the discourse of patriotism. This volume begins to demonstrate how complex the vocabulary of patriotism actually is, by investigating its diverse use during the Romantic period. Edited by Orrin Wang, essays by Francesco Crocco, Matthew Borushko, Daniel O'Quinn, Andrew Lincoln, Noah Heringman, and Jan Mieszkowski.

Historicizing Romantic Sexuality | January 2006
This volume looks at the protean constructions of sexuality in the Romantic period and in current Romanticist scholarship. Edited, introduced by Richard C. Sha, essays by Richard C. Sha, David M. Halperin, Jonathan Loesberg, Elizabeth Fay, Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, Susan S. Lanser, Bradford K. Mudge, Daniel O'Quinn and Andrew Elfenbein.

Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era | December 2005
The essays in this volume explore the relationship between Romantic Gothicism and the rise of the visual technologies centred on commercial exploitation of the magic lantern. Edited and introduced by Robert Miles , with essays by Fred Botting, Diane Long Hoeveler, Sophie Thomas, Dale Townshend, and Angela Wright.

Romanticism and Opera | May 2005
This collection of essays considers the importance of opera as both an essential ritual of court culture and an innovative art form with a considerable impact on period literature. Edited by Gillen D'Arcy Wood, with essays by Christina Fuhrmann, Diane Long Hoeveler, J. Jennifer Jones , Jessica K. Quillin, and Anne Williams.

Legacies of Paul de Man | May 2005
The essays in this volume evaluate the legacies of Paul de Man, who continues symbolically to embody an aspect of "theory" that resists easy routinization. Edited by Marc Redfield, with essays by Ian Balfour, Cynthia Chase, Sara Guyer, Jan Mieszkowski, Arkady Plotnitsky, Marc Redfield, Rei Terada, and Andrzej Warminski.

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