New at Romantic Circles


	Romantic Numbers (April 2013) Edited by Maureen N. McLane
The six essays in this volume offer a range of mediations prompted by the volume's title. With essays by Matthew F. Wickman, Marjorie Levinson, James Brooke-Smith, John Savarese, Bo Earle, Ron Broglio, and two afterwords by Maureen N. McLane, this volume explores older and newer logics of "matching" and "counting" and "measuring" (whether statistical, geometric, or otherwise un/calculable); they register as well an upsurge in interest in formal-language, neurocognitive and medial-historical approaches. These essays invite us to think "bodies," "multitudes," and "subjectivity" along different axes. They ask us to think about the (romantic) one, the (romantic) proper name, quantity, and quality; they invite us to reflect on the status of poetry and measure, about the work of the novel as totalization, about models of mind, about calculuses of populations and food. Ranging through Wordsworth, Scott, Malthus, Babbage, and Galt (among others), this volume points to new directions in romanticist thinking while reconstructing the complexity of romantic-period thought.

	Nobody: A Comedy in Two Acts (Drury Lane, 1794) by Mary Robinson. (March 2013) Edited by Terry F. Robinson
This edition is the first to present a widely available and searchable transcript of the play along with a comprehensive introduction, extensive notes by the editor, and contexts of the drama. Based on the only surviving manuscript of the play housed in the Larpent collection at the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, this edition reproduces the clean copy made by the theater and submitted to the Licensor of Plays. The Contexts section—comprised of a collection of newspaper puffs and reviews, visual satire, and poetry and prose extracts—provides a snapshot of the build-up and intense reaction to the staging of Nobody. Contemporary texts, images, and commentary uncover the historical and cultural framework within which Robinson produced her drama and, as such, offer insight into how Nobody engages some of the most pressing socio-political issues of the day.

	Romanticism & Biopolitics (December 2012) Edited by Alastair Hunt & Matthias Rudolf
This collection of articles is intended to initiate a conversation about and between biopolitics and romanticism. Its broad contention is that the study of biopolitics reanimates the question of romanticism in two senses. First, the set of conceptual resources provided in recent work on biopolitics opens up inventive lines of inquiry that enable scholars to re-think the already established awareness that the literature, philosophy, and culture of romanticism displays an obsession with life. In another sense biopolitics reanimates romanticism insofar as the current scholarly concern with life as an object of power marks the radical survival of romanticism. If romanticism responds well when examined in the light of contemporary biopolitical theory, then a constitutive part of this response is a certain resistance to biopolitical theory. The contributors to this volume demonstrate that the biopolitical intervention on life engages paradoxes, predicaments, and aporias that have been widely or fully appreciated neither by theorists of biopolitics nor by critics who take up their work. Romanticism, we suggest, is a privileged locus for the awareness that even the most assured representation of life turns upon an irreducible “literariness.”

	Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies (October 2012) by Karl Kroeber Edited and with a foreword by Joseph Viscomi
Originally intended to introduce a study of William Blake's later prophecies, the late Karl Kroeber's Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies is an accessible and astute survey of the prophetic work that Blake executed between 1788 and 1794. For Kroeber (1926-2009), former Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, the post-secular era we are now entering should be prepared to recognize Blake's centrality in academic literary humanism, which-in its secular phase-excluded Blake on account of his radical Christianity. Such exclusion, Kroeber points out, has not diminished Blake's immense-and still growing-impact on popular culture, on our music, fiction, film, and graphic novels, as well as on our ideas of creativity, spirituality, and individuality. In stark contrast to the idea of a "universal heart" and to the ideal rational societies envisioned by other Romantic writers, Blake argued that each individual was unique and that only complex social structures based, not on reason, but on the imagination, like Golgonooza, the City of Art, can realize and sustain the individual's innate divinity.

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