New essays offering fresh glimpses of Romanticism as interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic, illuminating the discursive features and the pan-European nature of the movement. Romanticism bubbled up as lava from such historical eruptions as the Napoleonic Wars. The power of its flow across disciplines and linguistic borders reminds us that the use of the term in a context limited to one linguistic, national, or political tradition, or to one discipline or area of human development, shows an essential ignorance of the ideational configurations elaborated and lived out by the movement. Among its consistent norms are the notion ofreality as a transcendent self-unfolding Geist, everything existing in a dialectical relationship with all else; the position that art reveals mythic understructures of reality; and that all kinds of kinship are more normalthan isolation. This book brings together essays that highlight the inclusivity of Romanticism. A team of eleven scholars offers fresh glimpses of Romanticism as it manifests itself in a number of disciplines, including most prominently literature, but also music, painting, and the sciences. In so doing, the contributors treat Romanticism as interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic, providing data and interpretive viewpoints that illuminate the discursive features and the pan-European nature of the movement. Contributors: Lloyd Davies, Ellis Dye, Stacey Hahn, Hollie Markland Harder, Jennifer Law-Sullivan, Sarah Lippert, Marjean D. Purinton, Ashley Shams, Kaitlin Gowan Southerly. Larry H. Peer is Professor of Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University. Christopher R. Clason is Professor of German at Oakland University.

A deep dread of puppets and the machinery that propels them surfaced in Romantic literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century; Romantic Automata is a collection of essays examining the rise of cultural suspicion of all imitations of homo sapiens and similar machinery, as witnessed in the literature and arts of the time. For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a celebration of human ingenuity, feats of science and reason. Among the Romantics, however, they prompted a contradictory apprehension about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering threatened the spiritual nature of life, the source of compassion in human society. Recent scholarship in post-humanism, post-colonialism, disability studies, post-modern feminism, eco-criticism, and radical Orientalism has significantly affected the critical discourse on this topic. The essays in this collection open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate or to supplement organic life.

For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a celebration of human ingenuity, feats of science and reason. Among the Romantics, however, they prompted a contradictory apprehension about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering threatened the spiritual nature of life, the source of compassion in human society. A deep dread of puppets and the machinery that propels them consequently surfaced in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature. Romantic Automata is a collection of essays examining the rise of this cultural suspicion of mechanical imitations of life. Recent scholarship in post-humanism, post-colonialism, disability studies, post-modern feminism, eco-criticism, and radical Orientalism has significantly affected the critical discourse on this topic. In engaging with the work and thought of Coleridge, Poe, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and other Romantic luminaries, the contributors to this collection open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate, supplement, or supplant organic life. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.