Romantic Realities ─ Speculative Realism and British Romanticism

Speculative realism is one of the most exciting, influential and controversial new branches of philosophy to emerge in recent years. Now, Evan Gottlieb shows that the speculative realism movement bears striking a resemblance to the ideas and beliefs of the best-known British poets of the Romantic era.

Romantic Realities analyses the parallels and echoes between the ideas of the most influential contemporary practitioners of speculative realism and the poetry and poetics of the most innovative Romantic poets. In doing so, it introduces you to the intellectual precedents and contemporary stakes of speculative realism, together with new understandings of the philosophical underpinnings and far-reaching insights of British Romanticism.

Evan Gottlieb is Associate Professor of English at Oregon State University. He is the author of Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order (Ohio State UP, 2014), Walter Scott and Contemporary Theory (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing 1707-1832 (Bucknell University Press, 2007). He is editor of Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760-1820 (Bucknell UP, 2015) and a new Norton Critical Edition of Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (2nd ed., WW Norton, 2015). He is co-editor, with Juliet Shields, of Representing Place in British Literature and Culture, 1660-1830: From Local to Global (Ashgate, 2013) and, with Ian Duncan, of Approaches to Teaching Scott's Waverley Novels (MLA, 2009).