Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism

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. * Frederick Burwick, University of California, Los Angeles *
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. -- Linda Freedman * The Review of English Studies *
There is much to admire in Sandy’s contribution to expanding the reach and relevance of romanticism. -- David J. Langston * Wallace Stevens Journal *
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. -- Wayne George Deakin * English Studies, Vol 105, 2024 *
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. -- Yuanxing Tan * Comparative Critical Studies, Vol 20.2-3, 2023 *