Global Romanticism

Book excerpt: For several decades, interest in the British Romantics’ theorizations and representations of the world beyond their national borders has been guided by postcolonial and, more recently, transatlantic paradigms. GlobalRomanticism: Origins, Orientations, andEngagements, 1760–1820 charts a new intellectual course by exploring the literature and culture of the Romantic era through the lens of long-durational globalization. In a series of wide-ranging but complementary chapters, this provocative collection of essays by established scholars makes the case that many British Romantics were committed to conceptualizing their world as an increasingly interconnected whole. In doing so, moreover, they were both responding to and shaping early modern versions of the transnational economic, political, sociocultural, and ecological forces known today as globalization.