Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism
Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Published:16th Feb '21
Should be back in stock very soon
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.
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 *
ISBN: 9781474421485
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 444g
200 pages