Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited

Richard C. Sha is Professor of Literature and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at American University in Washington, DC. He is the author of Imagination and Science in Romanticism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), which won the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize in 2018. In 2020, the National Endowment for the Humanities of the United States selected this book as one of twelve books in the humanities to fund for open access publication. His previous books include Perverse Romanticism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008) and with Joel Faflak, Romanticism and the Emotions (Cambridge UP, 2016). Joel Faflak is Professor of English and Theory at the University of Western Ontario. He is author of Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery (SUNY, 2008), co-author (with Ross Woodman) of Revelation and Knowledge: The Psyche in Romanticism (U of Toronto Press, 2011), and editor or co-editor of numerous essay collections and anthologies, most recently Romanticism and the Emotions (Cambridge UP, 2016), with Richard C. Sha, and William Blake: Modernity and Disaster (U of Toronto Press, 2020), with Tilottama Rajan.

This splendid collection returns to Harold Bloom’s Romanticism and Consciousness and revisits that 1970 collection’s field-defining questions about subjectivity and the modern self. Engaging scholarship on neuroscience, cognitive theory and philosophy of mind, Faflak, Sha, and their eminent contributors renew the concept of Romantic consciousness for the twenty-first century.

• Acknowledgements1. Introduction: Romanticism and Consciousness Redux - Richard C. Sha and Joel FaflakPart 1: New Models of Consciousness2. Romanticism Against Consciousness - Alan Richardson3. Romantic Panpsychism - Colin Jager4. Shelley and the Real of Faith - Joel Faflak5. Blakean Experience and the Hard Problem of Consciousness Revisited - Richard C. ShaPart 2: States of Consciousness6. ‘Poetry is passion’: Lyrical Balladry as Affective Narratology - Mark J. Bruhn7. After Affects and Second Thoughts: Wordsworth, Eliot and the Forms of Emotional Thinking - Nancy Yousef8. Studio States: Thought Out of Place - Jacques Khalip9. The Media Ecology of Romantic Consciousness: Knowledge in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head - Ralf HaekelPart 3: Social and Ecological Models of Consciousness10. Why Reasonable Children Don’t Think that Nutcracker is Alive or that the Mouse King is Real - Lisa Zunshine11. Prone Minds and Extended Selves: The Cenci - Yasmin Solomonescu12. Gothic Ecologies of Mind - John Savarese13. May Flies and Horseshoe Crabs: Romantic and Post-Romantic Consciousness, Institutions, and Populations - Robert MitchellPart 4: Race and Consciousness14. Shapeshifting Romantic Consciousness - Kate Singer15. At Peace with Strangers: Feeling Disoriented in the London Panorama of Constantinople, 1801–1802 - Humberto Garcia16. Doubling Down: On White Consciousness, Friends and The Friend - Julie A. CarlsonList of ContributorsIndex