Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment

About the Book

A critical re-evaluation of the imaginative transformations of Romanticism by major American writers
This book provides innovative readings of literary works of British Romanticism and its influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literary culture and thought. It traverses the traditional critical boundaries of prose and poetry in American and Romantic and post-Romantic writing. Analysing significant works by nineteenth-century writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, as well as the contemporary writings of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Wallace Stevens, the book reasserts the significance of second-generation Romantic writers for American literary culture. Sandy reassesses our understanding of Romantic inheritance and influence on post-Romantic aesthetics, subjectivity and the natural world in the American imagination.

Table of Contents:
AcknowledgementsList of Abbreviations I. Imagining Nature1. Introduction: Reflections on Transatlantic Exchanges, Subjectivity and Nature2. Romantic Influence and Nature Reconsidered: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau II. Romantic Transactions: Subjects in Nature3. Dissolving Subjectivities: Imagined Selves in F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Keats4. Ghostly Selves, Light and Nature in William Faulkner: Wordsworthian Shadows and Byronic Shades III. Romantic Transformations: Fictional Selves and Nature5. Fictions of the Self and Nature: Reading Romanticism in Saul Bellow6. Re-Imagined Pastoral Poetics: Narrative Structures and the Environment in Toni Morrison and William WordsworthCoda: Nature without Self: Beauty, Death and Subjectivity in the Poetics of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens BibliographyIndex

About the Author :
Mark Sandy is Professor of English Literature at Durham University. His research interests are Romantic and nineteenth-century poetics and twentieth-century American Literature. His publications include Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley (Ashgate 2005; Routledge, 2019) and Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (Ashgate, 2013).

Review :
Like P. B. Shelley, calling upon ‘the phantoms of a thousand hours,’ Mark Sandy conjures the mind and spirit, the sentient presence in nature, animating the literary heritage. Liberating the transactions of Romanticism from timebound chronologies, Sandy illuminates brilliantly the literary engagement with dynamic nature in a wide diversity of American authors of the last century. Mark Sandy has written a ghost story. This is a book in which the influence of British Romanticism on American literature is described in terms of haunting, echo and poetic resonance. Sandy argues that American writers performed a failed and somewhat half-hearted, exorcism. He suggests that they used their Romantic inheritance to fashion an aesthetic of self and nature that appeared to be—and wanted to be—more independent and existentially charged than that of their British forbears… The result, Sandy argues, was something of a double haunting: a confrontation with the spectre of British Romantic writing that manifested as a ghostly self-reflexive feeling of alienation. There is much to admire in Sandy’s contribution to expanding the reach and relevance of romanticism. Mark Sandy does a stellar job of revising already well-trodden critical ground with a new ecocritical focus. Using both American and British Romanticism as a horizon, he guides us through the work of writers as diverse as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, Robert Frost and Derek Walcott. […] Sandy’s spectral approach forgoes any psychoanalytical troping, instead situating the environment as a philosophical point of reference. Given the traditional relationship between Romanticism and nature, this strangely paradoxical locus pays dividends. The book's contributions to the field lie in its refreshing account of the appearance of contradiction, multiplicity and polyvalency in aesthetics, subjectivity and nature. This reflects a global web of textual relation and transformation that spans historical eras and geographic locations… Sandy's analysis of the operations of poetic echoes and resemblances is nuanced, sophisticated and effective, providing a rich understanding of how the Romantic movement was transformed by transatlantic exchanges.