BiblioVault - Books about Romanticism

The Wild Man Within

An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism

Edward Dudley

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972

These essays trace the myth of the wild man from the Middle Ages to its disintegration into symbol in the periods following the discovery of America and encounter with real “wild men.” This is the first book to discuss the concept of wildness in the writings of the Enlightenment period in Western Europe and the first to attempt a broad, interdisciplinary approach to the subject of primitivism, not only from a strict “history of ideas” approach, but through discussions of individual works, both literary and political, and encompassing various subject matter from racism to the origins of language.

Contributors: Richard Ashcraft; Ehrhard Bahr; John G. Burke; Earl Miner; Gary B. Nash; Stanley Robe; Geoffrey Symcox; Peter Thoralev; Hayden V. White, and the editors.

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Wordsworth and the Green Romantics

Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century

Lisa Ottum

University of New Hampshire Press, 2016

Situated at the intersection of ecocriticism, affect studies, and Romantic studies, this collection breaks new ground on the role of emotions in Western environmentalism. Recent scholarship highlights how traffic between Romantic-era literature and science helped to catalyze Green Romanticism. Closer to our own moment, the affective turn reflects similar cross-disciplinary collaboration, as many scholars now see the physiological phenomenon of affect as a force central to how we develop conscious attitudes and commitments. Together, these trends offer suggestive insights for the study of Green Romanticism.

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Worm Work

Recasting Romanticism

Janelle A. Schwartz

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Worms. Natural history is riddled with them. Literature is crawling with them. From antiquity to today, the ubiquitous and multiform worm provokes an immediate discomfort and unconscious distancing: it remains us against them in anthropocentric anxiety. So there is always something muddled, or dirty, or even offensive when talking about worms. Rehabilitating the lowly worm into a powerful aesthetic trope, Janelle A. Schwartz proposes a new framework for understanding such a strangely animate nature. Worms, she declares, are the very matter with which the Romantics rethought the relationship between a material world in constant flux and the human mind working to understand it.

Worm Work studies the lesser-known natural historical records of Abraham Trembley and his contemporaries and the familiar works of Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin, William Blake, Mary Shelley, and John Keats, to expose the worm as an organism that is not only reviled as a taxonomic terror but revered as a sign of great order in nature as well as narrative. This book traces a pattern of cultural production, a vermiculture that is as transformative of matter as it is of mind. It distinguishes decay or division as positive processes in Romantic era writings, compounded by generation or renewal and used to represent the biocentric, complex structuring of organicism.

Offering the worm as an archetypal figure through which to recast the evolution of a literary order alongside questions of taxonomy from 1740 to 1820 and on, Schwartz unearths Romanticism as a rich humus of natural historical investigation and literary creation.

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