Global Romanticism: Out of bounds in the transnational 19th century

Abstract

This article evaluates the contributions of global Romanticism to the study of Romanticism at large, connecting these contributions to work in transnational 18th and 19th‐century literary studies and world literature studies. The first section provides a genealogy of global Romanticism as a subfield, which has developed into roughly two strands: studies of imperialism or slavery on the one hand, and studies of globalization or translocalism on the other. The first strand has been dominant throughout global Romanticism's history, while the latter has mostly appeared in the last decade, and each strand of scholarship has understood and mobilized historicist methodologies differently. While the impulse to historicize was well suited to scholarship on imperialism and slavery, it initially seemed presentist to speak of globalization. That has changed, and work on globalism has made it possible to see Romanticism playing out in times and places far from Britain between the French Revolution and the First Reform Act. The second section explores global Romanticism's limitations and challenges, chief among which is how to resist centering British writing and Euro‐centric epistemologies. How do critics in English studies articulate and understand their disciplinary limitations? How might World Literature studies approach a global Romanticism differently? The third section attempts to come to terms with these challenges by highlighting three productive trends in recent scholarship: close and nuanced attention to transculturation, resistance to English‐language dominance, and flexibility with regards to temporal boundaries. These developments push against ingrained practices of English literary studies in general. The final section highlights a productive direction for future work in the field by analyzing anonymous parodies of British Romantic poetry published in American newspapers. This case study joins the work of other scholars studying the unread poetry of colonialism, arguing for the importance of evanescent, seemingly disposable writing to our understanding of literary history across national borders.