New Publication: The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and World Literature

Edited by Emily Sun, Barnard College, Columbia University, and Orrin N. C. Wang, University of Maryland, College Park

The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and World Literature takes as its occasion the fact that the archive of Romantic studies is every day expanding far beyond its Anglo-European confines, incorporating an ever-volatile constellation of works that, like World Literature, understands itself not in any monolithically Western sense but instead as a rhizomatic, polycentric expansion of temporalities, histories, and cultures. Here, a diverse cast of expert scholars reflect on how key concepts in Romantic literary and philosophical writings – periodicity, revolution, empire and settler culture, modernity, abolition, and the problem of language – inspire World Literature's conception of its own methodologies and texts. Covering writers ranging from Lord Byron, Immanuel Kant, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Clare to Simon Bolivar, Hérard Dumesle, Hafez, Rabindranath Tagore, and Ocean Vuong, this collection showcases how the fields of Romanticism and World Literature interact in ways that create new horizons for the study of planetary culture.

• Reveals the major ways in which Romanticism contributed to the historical formation and contemporary study of World Literature

• Models research into diverse, multi-lingual archives around the world, including essays that work across languages; between literary studies and the natural sciences, politics, and economics; and across diverse canonical and vernacular forms of expression

• Applies the self-reflexive and self-critical tendencies of Romanticism to critical reading in a global and comparative context, including textually close and theoretically subtle readings that initiate and guide readers to think expansively with literature