Claire Colebrook, Chair & Dissertation Advisor Shara McCallum, Major Field Member Daniel Purdy, Outside Unit & Field Member Hester Blum, Major Field Member Janet Lyon, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Keywords:
Romanticism Poetry Poetics Anthropocene Pastoral Bower Edmund Spenser Mary Robinson John Clare Felicia Hemans Charlotte Smith The Faerie Queene Post Humanism Dipesh Chakrabarty Timothy Morton Manuel Arias-Maldonado Heather Sullivan Jacques Khalip Andreas Malm Anahid Nersessian
Abstract:
The Romantic Bower explores the bower as a pastoral configuration adopted by Romantic poets from Spenserian motifs. In the context of the Anthropocene and Post-Humanist debates, the bower demonstrates the limits of the imaginative freedom of the Western subject. The poet’s attempt to carve out a new ecological formation as an alternative to the contingent present is ultimately a failure as Anthropocenic relationality intrudes. The bower, then, allows new possibilities for reading Romanticism as a contention with proto-globalist awarenesses of an inescapably tangential world.
