Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760–1820(Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850)

For several decades, interest in the British Romantics’ theorizations and representations of the world beyond their national borders has been guided by postcolonial and, more recently, transatlantic paradigms. GlobalRomanticism: Origins, Orientations, andEngagements, 1760–1820 charts a new intellectual course by exploring the literature and culture of the Romantic era through the lens of long-durational globalization. In a series of wide-ranging but complementary chapters, this provocative collection of essays by established scholars makes the case that many British Romantics were committed to conceptualizing their world as an increasingly interconnected whole. In doing so, moreover, they were both responding to and shaping early modern versions of the transnational economic, political, sociocultural, and ecological forces known today as globalization.

Table of Contents:
Contents List of Illustrations Introduction: British Romanticism and Early Globalization: Developing the Modern World Picture Evan Gottlieb Part I: Origins Chapter One: Spawn of Ossian, Ian Duncan Chapter Two: Burke and Hemans: Colonialism and the Claims of Family, Stuart Peterfreund Chapter Three: Charlotte Smith’s Network Story, Yoon Sun Lee Chapter Four: Localizing and Globalizing Burns’ Songs: Romanticism and the Analogies of Improvement, Steve Newman Part II: Orientations Chapter Five: “[N]o place on earth/ Can ever be a solitude”: Lyrical Ballads, Hartleianism, and a World of Places, Michael Wiley Chapter 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 Jarrells Chapter Eight: Frankenstein’s Transport: Modernity, Mobility, and the Science of Feeling, Miranda Burgess Part III: Engagements Chapter Nine: John Galt’s Logics of Worlds, Matthew Wickman Chapter 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 McAuley Chapter Eleven: Global Flows: Romantic-era Terraforming, Robert Mitchell Afterword: The World Viewed, Katie Trumpener Bibliography Index

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

Review :
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. The excellent essays in the collection tend to explore the interface between nascent imperial formations and emergent understandings of how subjects and populations are linked around the globe