Abstract
The chapter begins by outlining how some of the central concepts and characteristics of the period — including sympathy, the imagination, lyric poetry, and experiments in nonhuman perception — show many Romantic writers to be displaying a posthumanist sensibility, or what we might think of as a strange kinship. Then, the chapter offers an account of how the field has been traditionally read and of the pathways that have been opened into critical posthumanist approaches. After tracing recent work in Romanticist scholarship that is informed by a posthumanist perspective and methodology, it then provides short posthumanist readings of three canonical Romantic texts: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” and John Keats’s “To Autumn.” Following this account of the field, the chapter briefly considers the Romantic roots of a technologically inflected posthumanism to acknowledge the ways the period also participates in a more popular understanding of posthumanism with implications for cyborg theory and virtual reality. Finally, while the focus here is principally on British Romanticism, the chapter also explores how the tentacles of posthumanist thought extend into German and American Romanticisms and offers, in conclusion, some words on where posthumanist scholarship will move in Romantic studies in the years to come, including the need to consider its intersections with critical race studies.
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Effinger, E. (2022). Romanticism and Critical Posthumanism. In: Herbrechter, S., Callus, I., Rossini, M., Grech, M., de Bruin-Molé, M., John Müller, C. (eds) Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42681-1_5-1
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