Romantic Circles Blog

Romantic Circles is delighted to announce the publication of a new volume in our Praxis series, Romanticism and Disaster, co-edited by Jacques Khalip and David Collings.

In essays by Scott Juengel, William Keach, Timothy Morton, and Rei Terada, this volume considers and responds to the timely concept of devastated life by addressing how the capacity to read, interpret, and absorb disaster necessitates significant changes in theory, ethics, and common life. What if the consequences or “experience” of a disaster were less about psychic survival than an unblinking desire to face down the disaster as a challenge to normative structures?

As a whole, Romanticism and Disaster attends to the rhetorical, epistemological, political, and social effects of Romantic critique, and reflects on how processes of destruction and reconstitution, ruination and survival, are part and parcel of Romanticism’s grappling with a negativity that haunts its corners. Put in this way, “disaster” does not signal a referential event, but rather an undoing of certain apparently prior categories of dwelling, and forces us to contemplate living otherwise. In confronting the end of things, what are the conditions or possibilities of existence amidst catastrophe? What is a crisis, and what kinds of challenges does it occasion? What can be philosophically gained or lost by analyzing disaster in its multiple sites, contexts, and instances?

Romanticism and Disaster can be found here.

Romantic Circles is very pleased to announce a new volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis series, Robert Bloomfield: The Inestimable Blessing of Letters, edited by John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan.

Robert Bloomfield’s letters document one artist’s struggles (and sometimes his victories) to share his unique voice and vision; the online publication of his extant letters (a companion to this collection of essays) reveals new and exciting insights into Bloomfield the artist and the man.The essays included in this Praxis volume highlight and draw attention to aspects of Bloomfield’s literary production that would likely not be possible without the full access to his letters that the edition provides, and make a strong case for why Bloomfield continues to be worthy of study.They suggest how much more remains to be said about this prolific poet.

This volume makes use of the previously published edition at Romantic Circles, The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and His Circle, edited by Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt. This edition of Bloomfield”s Collected Letters constitutes every known letter by Bloomfield himself, plus a selection of the letters sent to him by literary correspondents and those exchanged between members of his circle.