Josh Lambier

Though the Romantic era is often imagined as the “age of revolution,” recent criticism in the field has seen renewed interest in Romanticism's relationship to evolution, including the resurgence of such topics as organicism, vitalism, natural history, and natural philosophy, as well as other salient themes from the physical and life sciences. This essay offers a contextual introduction for a cluster of articles around the topic of evolution as a concept for literary theory and criticism in Romantic studies, articles that focus critical attention on complex evolutionary ideas like contingency, chance, species transformation, monstrosity, extinction, and the inhuman. The aim of Romantic Evolutions is to reimagine prevailing notions of evolution by tracing their modern origins to literary, cultural, and scientific discourses of the transitional period 1775–1859, a time that witnessed the genesis of the modern idea of “literature” alongside of the emergence of specialized disciplines, such as geology, biology, physiology, chemistry, psychology, and anthropology. Instead of searching through 18th- and early 19th-century science for “forerunners” to the Darwinian revolution, the essays in the volume focus attention on the important contributions of Romantic poets, philosophers, and scientists who have too often been overlooked by the empirical sciences. And yet, by shifting the central focus away from Darwin and his theory of natural selection, contributors also revisit his relationship to Romanticism with fresh eyes. Taken together, the volume seeks to provoke a reevaluation of our current understanding of the Romantic conception of evolution, one that will open new critical perspectives and orientations for scholars within and beyond the field.

ABSTRACT Taking Kant’s well-known refusal of the “right of resistance” as a point of departure, this paper outlines an alternative approach to the Kantian theory of revolution by investigating the aesthetic dimension of his reception of global insurrectionary movements, particularly his interest in the world spectator’s “enthusiasm” for the French Revolution. Like the experience of the sublime, where the subject confronts instances of nature’s immensity and power that exceed the imagination’s capacity for presentation, revolution confronts us with formless events of human history. The sublime, however, occasions a second moment of recovery. Following the painful experience of the imagination’s impotence, the judging subject is enlivened by the discovery of what Kant calls “a capacity for resistance,” that is, our ability to transcend forces that produce feelings of futility and powerlessness. This paper argues that Kant’s sublime right to resist not only anticipates the revolutionary imperative of Romanticism, but also foregrounds the way in which aesthetics defies the law’s efforts to prohibit disobedience and dissent. But it concludes with a note of caution towards the sublime’s tendency to suppress the rights of nature, a suppression that could be overturned by what Kant calls “a second epoch of natural revolution” that pushes aside the human species altogether.

Taking Kant’s well-known refusal of the “right of resistance” as a
point of departure, this paper outlines an alternative approach to the Kantian theory of revolution by investigating the aesthetic
dimension of his reception of global insurrectionary movements, particularly his interest in the world spectator’s “enthusiasm” for the French Revolution. Like the experience of the sublime, where the subject confronts instances of nature’s immensity and power that exceed the imagination’s capacity for presentation, revolution confronts us with formless events of human history. The sublime, however, occasions a second moment of recovery. Following the painful experience of the imagination’s impotence, the judging subject is enlivened by the discovery of what Kant calls “a capacity for resistance,” that is, our ability to transcend forces that produce feelings of futility and powerlessness. This paper argues that Kant’s sublime right to resist not only anticipates the revolutionary imperative of Romanticism, but also foregrounds the way in which aesthetics defies the law’s efforts to prohibit disobedience and dissent. But it concludes with a note of caution towards the sublime’s tendency to suppress the rights of nature, a suppression that could be overturned by what Kant calls “a second epoch of natural revolution” that pushes aside the human species altogether.

Given the resurgence of interest in the relation between Shelley’s political essays and poetry, what concept of relationality can be posed to move beyond an old, entrenched opposition between the social commitment of prose and the abstract withdrawal of poetry to theorize a novel form of “political poetics”? In what ways do Shelley’s reflections on the history of modern revolution inform his ideas of literary experience and political subjectivity? How, moreover, does Shelley’s work provoke what he outlines in A Defence of Poetry (1821) as “a beneficial change in opinion or institution” through aesthetic experience, without falling prey to an escapist flight into inwardness? Taking these questions as points of departure, this essay traces within Shelley’s work a theory of aesthetic resistance by reading between his historical-political reflections on the British reform movement in A Philosophical View of Reform (1819-20) and his critical aesthetics. The essay also explores how Shelley’s appeal to an aesthetic dimension in politics creates new modes of experience that resist forms of inhumanity by making visible the otherwise invisible wrongs suffered by groups who remain excluded from participation in the public commons.

Focusing on the political thought of Schelling and Hegel - beginning with the early texts (1796–1802), then moving briefly to Hegel’s well known Philosophy of Right (1821) – this essay revisits the Romantic-Idealist theory of the organic state by returning to its genesis in the turbulent political, cultural and scientific debates of the post-Revolutionary period. Given the controversial nature of its historical (mis)appropriations, the organic idea of the state has become synonymous with totality and closure. This essay argues, however, that the contemporary rejection of organicism relies on narrow interpretations of Romantic and Idealist notions of organic life, interpretations that fail to do justice to the complex organismic philosophies emerging in the early nineteenth century. In order to move beyond the Enlightenment idea of a contractual state, Hegel and Schelling read the political through the organic. What gets carried over in this translation is not simply a logical principle of organic unity, but the entire system of relations that comprise organismic life. Departing from the Kantian concept of the organic, where parts are regulated by the whole, Hegel and Schelling open their systems of thought, consciously or not, to more organismic forces. The organismic refers to uncontrollable forces within the organism, such as illness, disease and death, which run counter to the whole. Instead of viewing the organic in strictly metaphorical terms, Schelling and Hegel’s concept of political life maintains a relation to the overdetermined genetic and biological processes of the organism, material processes that unsettle totalized structures.

Though the Romantic era is often imagined as the " age of revolution, " recent criticism in the field has seen renewed interest in Romanticism's relationship to evolution, including the resurgence of such topics as organicism, vitalism, natural history, and natural philosophy, as well as other salient themes from the physical and life sciences. This essay offers a contextual introduction for a cluster of articles around the topic of evolution as a concept for literary theory and criticism in Romantic studies, articles that focus critical attention on complex evolutionary ideas like contingency, chance, species transformation, monstrosity , extinction, and the inhuman. The aim of Romantic Evolutions is to reimagine prevailing notions of evolution by tracing their modern origins to literary, cultural, and scientific discourses of the transitional period 1775–1859, a time that witnessed the genesis of the modern idea of " literature " alongside of the emergence of specialized disciplines, such as geology, biology, physiology, chemistry, psychology, and anthropology. Instead of searching through 18th-and early 19th-century science for " forerunners " to the Darwinian revolution, the essays in the volume focus attention on the important contributions of Romantic poets, philosophers, and scientists who have too often been overlooked by the empirical sciences. And yet, by shifting the central focus away from Darwin and his theory of natural selection, contributors also revisit his relationship to Romanticism with fresh eyes. Taken together, the volume seeks to provoke a reevaluation of our current understanding of the Romantic conception of evolution, one that will open new critical perspectives and orientations for scholars within and beyond the field.