Journal Article

American Romanticism, Again

JACKSON, VIRGINIA

2016

Overview

Romanticists themselves may admit that their original canon was framed by a Paris editor and swiftly republished in Philadephia (and so, as Meredith McGill points out, was transatlantic from the start), or that expressive poetics actually derived from the Orientalist Sir William Jones's Sanskrit and Persian translations (and so, as Aamir Mufti points out, was Orientalized from the start), or that the historical coincidence of the emergence of Romanticism and the middle of the Middle Passage was no coincidence (and so, as Edouard Glissant and many others have pointed out, was invested in the emergence of the worst forms of modernity from the start), but those admissions have not made much difference in the way we tell the story of Romanticism and almost no difference in the way we conduct the business of the profession of literary studies.4 When we do speak of American Romanticism, we tend to mean Transcendentalism, and by Transcendentalism, we tend to mean Emerson and the writers in conversation with his heady mixture of German philosophy, British poetics, and American pragmatism:

• Publisher: THE GRADUATE SCHOOL · BOSTON UNIVERSITY,Johns Hopkins University Press,Boston University
• Subject: 1800-1899 / 19th century / American literature / American Poetry / Conversation / Criticism and interpretation / English Literature / genre conventions / German language / History of ideas / Literary translation / Lyric poetry / Mill, John Stuart (1806-1873) / Nersessian, Anahid / Nineteenth Century / periodization / Persian language / persona / Philosophy / Poetics / Poetry / Poets / Reading / Romanticism / Sanskrit / Whitman, Walt (1819-1892) / Works