SURVIVING ROMANTICISM: DISASTER AND SURVIVAL IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURE

Abstract

“Surviving Romanticism” argues that fictional and historical representations of disaster and survival in the Romantic period bear the potential to establish radically new ways of social and political organization that do not reproduce or replicate the pre-catastrophic world. I locate my project at the intersection of studies on disaster in Romanticism, on the one hand, and queer theories of non-reproductivity, on the other. Extending but also complicating recent Romanticist scholarship by Jacques Khalip, Anahid Nerssessian, Sara Guyer and others, “Surviving Romanticism” asserts that queer survival, a form of surviving based on an existential discontinuity that does not reproduce materially or ideologically the pre-catastrophic world, constitutes the only possibility for radical worldmaking. “Surviving Romanticism” asserts that disaster is omnipresent in the writings of the Romantic period affecting both the content of these texts as well as their structure, with disaster materializing formally as fragmentation, repetition and the lack of narrative climax and conclusion. “Surviving Romanticism” points out that in the texts this project studies survival fiercely opposes recuperation. This opposition forces us to think that for fundamental change to happen we need to move away from repairing the damaged world of the past and envision instead new ideologies and social relations that do not focus on usefulness, exchangeability and marketability. The four main chapters of “Surviving Romanticism” bring together a variety of prose, poetry and non-fiction where both real and fictional disaster takes place: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” and William Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee” and “The Last of the Flock,” all three poems from the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, Jane Austen’s Emma and the freedom narrative of Mary Prince. Even though most of these texts have been discussed in the critical tradition, “Surviving Romanticism” interrogates the ideology of previous critical approaches that have read texts like The Last Man as cautionary tales that force us to improve our present. Instead, in “Surviving Romanticism” I suggest that survival and worldmaking take place when fictional characters, such as Lionel Verney, and historical actors, such as Mary Prince, decide to stop reproducing the world around them one that has forced them to dwell in disaster. Instead, they start to behave as if they are inhabiting a world beyond productivity, usefulness, marketability, exchangeability, racial subjection and racial capitalism that our current world practices, with these concepts constituting some of the key ideas this project discusses