New Romanticisms

Abstract

The joint NASSR/BARS conference, “New Romanticisms,” eventually held at Edge Hill University in August 2022, grew from a silly pun on the New Romantics, a 1980s musical subculture characterized by flamboyant fashion, into a serious consideration of new approaches to Romantic studies, asking how and why we study Romanticism today. Originally planned for August 2021 as a straightforwardly in-person affair, the “New Romanticisms” which took place a year later in a world transformed by the Covid-19 pandemic had to consider how scholars of Romanticism could gather together safely, opting for a hybrid mode combining in-person conviviality with inclusive online access. Inclusivity and conviviality were the watchwords of the conference, bringing Romanticists back together in multiple forms after painful separation. The essays gathered for this special issue reflect the ethos of the conference, combining diversity and collaboration to think about the multiplicity of Romanticisms available to scholars today. We begin by celebrating the winners of the joint NASSR/BARS Graduate Student Essay Prizes, Dana Moss and Diana Little. In “Waste in the Nineteenth-Century Lyric,” Dana Moss explores an erotics of waste whereby, in Shelley’s “The SensitivePlant,” plants thrive as they rot, so that things already used enter into a queer mode of survival, a nonhuman thriving. Diana Little’s “Wordsworth’s Webs: Spinning the Ecological Elegy” explores the relationship between Wordsworth’s elegiac practice and ecological interests in two poems which probe the natural world’s resistance to being co-opted by the pathetic fallacy. Little argues not only that ecological concerns inform Wordsworth’s poetic elegies but also that the elegy form as practiced by Wordsworth, alert to the disconnections between humans and our environment, has something to teach ecology. The next section of this special issue privileges the ethos of collaboration which informed “New Romanticisms” with a series of co-authored articles reflecting upon panels embodying the international spirit of the conference. Indu Ohri and Lenora Hanson’s “Reflections on Remixing Romanticism: A Plenary Workshop on Anti-Racist Teaching” argues for the importance of anti-racist teaching by setting out how to create an inclusive and activist classroom through making links between international experiences of injustice and revolution. The series of co-authored articles which follow Ohri and Hanson’s reflections remix Romanticism in their own idiosyncratic ways from the musical to the environmental. Amanda Blake Davis and Matthew Sangster’s “‘Load Every Rift’: Power, Opposition, and Community in Romantic Poetry and