Transcendental Poetics and the Futures of American Romanticism

An ambitious, in-depth reexamination of transnational Romanticism, from the late eighteenth century to the present—and into the future. Transcendental Poetics and the Futures of American Romanticism argues that Romanticism does not correspond to a specific archive or period but is rather a project—an effort to reconcile the material and the ideal and to disclose ultimate reality. The book spells out the contours of this project as formulated by its original European and American proponents and examines how it has been taken up and further developed by their twentieth- and twenty-first-century heirs in literature and philosophy. The book's range of engagement is vast as its author, Ridvan Askin, traces conceptual affinities and continuities among the Jena Romantics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Gilles Deleuze, Charles Olson, E. L. Doctorow, Jennifer Egan, contemporary analytic philosophy of mind, the new materialisms, critical posthumanism, and more. Ultimately, the book calls for a wholesale re-Romanticization of thought, or, more accurately, given that the Romantics themselves did not think that Romanticism had been accomplished and remained a task for the future, the first proper implementation of Romanticism. It is about time that Romanticism finally gets off the ground.