In November 2006, the International Conference on Romanticism convened for its annual conference on the campus of Arizona State University and explored a wide range of work identified as engaged romantic, as a mode and a practice, rather than simply as a literary historical period defined by a specific temporal spectrum (c. 1750-1850). As the introduction to the volume suggests, most writers during the period were actively engaged in the cultural articulation of the aesthetics, criticism, ethics, poetics, and politics of the age, and a large number of writers deployed their talents to help transform the public sphere, whether shaping responses to the practices of slavery or resisting the emergence of a crystallized form of Newtonianism at the foundation of Enlightenment epistemology. The intellectual and disciplinary range of the essays included in this volume pay tribute to this often neglected aspect of the revolutionary dictates of what has come to be called Romanticism, and the following critical essays, offered by both thoroughly established and relatively new voices within Romantic Studies, examine virtually every aspect of this approach to Romantic thought and writing. Whether focused on the formal and intellectual practices at the foundation of the novel, the philosophical resonance of William Wordsworth within emergent forms of eco-criticism, the play of the transatlantic Romantic imagination, the aesthetic commitments of Romantic art and music, or the current process of pedagogical engagements, the essays sound the depths of what engaged practice can accomplish, both in the age of Romanticism itself as well as our own moment.
About the Author: Mark Lussier, a professor of English at Arizona State University, is the author of Romantic Dynamics: The Poetics of Physicality (Macmillan, 1999) and the forthcoming Blake and Lacan (Peter Lang 2008). He is the co-editor of Perspective as a Problem in the Art, History and Literature of Early Modern England (Mellen, 1993) and has edited special issues of European Romantic Review, New Orleans Review, and The Wordsworth Circle. Most recently, he edited a special issue of Romantic Circles Praxis focused on Romanticism and Buddhism, and has published numerous essays in a wide range of journals, including 1650-1850, Italian Culture, Literature and Religion, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Studies in Romanticism, Visual Language, The Wordsworth Circle, and Women's Studies. Bruce Matsunaga is a doctoral candidate at Arizona State University working on a dissertation that uses an ecological approach to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He divides his time between Romanticism and his full-time job as a Research Associate in the Department of English where he teaches online pedagogy to faculty, teaches computer application workshops, runs the department web site, is their resident audio/video guru, and handles just about anything else that involves technology.