Global Romanticism

Evan Gottlieb is associate professor of English in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University.

Part of the 'Transits: Literature, Thought, and Culture, 1650–1850' series, this collection builds on the foundation of post-colonialism to explore how Romantic writers viewed themselves in relation to other peoples, places, and world literatures. As a time when the British Empire was expanding and technological and scientific innovations were making it possible to have easier contact with the rest of the world, this period can be seen as the beginning of 'globalization.' Written by an impressive group of scholars, the essays Gottleib has brought together explore this topic through a wide variety of Romantic authors, from the well-known to the obscure. The most interesting chapters examine the connection between Robert Burns’s writings and the independence movement in India, the genre of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and its connection with the ill-fated African English colony in Sierra Leone, and the unusual climate reformation ideas of Erasmus Darwin and Percy Shelley. Both wanted to reform the world’s climate by loosening the ice caps, but Shelley had the even more extreme idea of straightening Earth’s axis in the hope that all the world would enjoy a temperate climate. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

• ContentsList of IllustrationsIntroduction: British Romanticism and Early Globalization: Developing the Modern World PictureEvan Gottlieb Part I: OriginsChapter One: Spawn of Ossian, Ian DuncanChapter Two: Burke and Hemans: Colonialism and the Claims of Family, Stuart Peterfreund Chapter Three: Charlotte Smith’s Network Story, Yoon Sun LeeChapter Four: Localizing and Globalizing Burns’ Songs: Romanticism and the Analogies of Improvement, Steve NewmanPart II: OrientationsChapter Five: “[N]o place on earth/ Can ever be a solitude”: Lyrical Ballads, Hartleianism, and a World of Places, Michael WileyChapter Six: Sailing Blind: Climacteric Orientations toward the Local and Global in Wordsworth and Byron, Samuel Baker Chapter Seven: We have Never been National: Romance, Regionalism, and the Global in Scott’s Waverley Novels, Anthony JarrellsChapter Eight: Frankenstein’s Transport: Modernity, Mobility, and the Science of Feeling, Miranda BurgessPart III: EngagementsChapter Nine: John Galt’s Logics of Worlds, Matthew WickmanChapter Ten: Romantic Recycling: The Global Economy and Secondhand Language in Equiano's Interesting Narrative and the Letters of the Sierra Leone Settlers, Debbie Lee and Kirk McAuleyChapter Eleven: Global Flows: Romantic-era Terraforming, Robert MitchellAfterword: The World Viewed, Katie TrumpenerBibliographyIndex