Description
Book SynopsisRomantic Revelations argues that Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, John Clare, and Jane Austen sketch out a post-apocalyptic world that is paradoxically the vision that offers us hope. Washington contends that these authors craft an optimistic vision of the future that leads to a new politics.
Trade Review"Washington’s richly suggestive book is a timely and useful polemic for all those working in Romantic studies who value the period as an age of revolution and institutional change. In postapocalyptic constructions of hope and love, Romanticism finds new resonance in our own age of climate crisis. Even amidst the so-called sixth extinction, Washington makes the case that there is ample space and time to defamiliarize ‘the thing with feathers’ and the ‘ever-fixed mark.’ Washington’s call for a new social contract that thinks beyond narrow species categories is a welcome reminder that this cohort of two-hundred-year-old Romantic reformers is still changing the world." -- Fuson Wang, University of California, Riverside *
Journal of British Studies *
"The philosophically speculative twist Washington brings to bear on what are undoubtedly, unavoidably acute, searing political challenges makes this a book for our times. As we exit the Anthropocene, hopefully with grace rather than blindness and resentment, to paraphrase John Ricco, we are compelled, as Washington suggests, to understand ‘the world on its own terms.’ Seems damn-near impossible to me. But Washington gives me hope that this can be done with hope, and love, and that an emerging generation of Romantics scholars among whom he counts himself might just pull it off." -- Joel Faflak, University of Western Ontario *
Romantic Circles *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: There Is a Light That Never Goes Out? 1. The Mind Is Its Own Place: What Percy Shelley's Mountain Did Not Say 2. No More Cakes and Ale, Only Oil Slicks: Mary Shelley’s Post-Apocalyptic State of Nature 3. Byron’s Speculative Turn: The Biopolitics of Paradise 4. Birds Do It, Bees Do It: John Clare, Biopolitics, and the Nonhuman Origins of Love 5. The Best of All Possible End of the Worlds: Jane Austen’s Frankenstein, or Love in the Ruins Coda: After Extinctualism: Hope for Life Notes Bibliography Index
