Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism

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.”

"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

Mark Sandy is Professor of English Literature at Durham University. His research interests are Romantic and nineteenth-century poetics and twentieth-century American Literature. His publications include Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley (Ashgate 2005; Routledge, 2019) and Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (Ashgate, 2013).

'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 AngelesA critical re-evaluation of the imaginative transformations of Romanticism by major American writersThis 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 later 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. Mark Sandy is Professor of English Literature at Durham University.Cover image, Portland Head Lighthouse, Jerry McElroy, 2016Cover design:[EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.comISBN 978-1-4744-2148-5Barcode

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.