Radical Romanticism
Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination
Published on 16. September 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
384 pages
978-0-231-21333-2 (ISBN)
Description
Romanticism is often reduced to nostalgic pastoralism and solitary contemplation of the sublime. But a radical strand of Romantic writers and thinkers offered sweeping political, ecological, and religious critiques of capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, and environmental destruction. Interweaving canonical nineteenth-century authors with Black and Indigenous thinkers who transformed their work, this book is a bold new account of Romanticism for today's deeply entrenched crises.
Mark S. Cladis examines the progressive democratic, religious, and environmental beliefs and practices that informed European Romantic literature and its sustained legacies in North America. His interpretation interweaves diverse voices such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Leslie Marmon Silko while also revealing the progressive visions of Romantic authors such as Rousseau, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Forging connections among literary and philosophical traditions while closely reading a wide range of texts, Radical Romanticism shows how storytelling is central to the pursuit of justice and flourishing for the human and the more-than-human worlds. Bringing together environmental humanities, literary theory, political theory, and religious studies, this book makes the case for a renewed radical Romanticism, offering urgent resources for a world beset by catastrophe, uncertainty, and despair.
Mark S. Cladis examines the progressive democratic, religious, and environmental beliefs and practices that informed European Romantic literature and its sustained legacies in North America. His interpretation interweaves diverse voices such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Leslie Marmon Silko while also revealing the progressive visions of Romantic authors such as Rousseau, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Forging connections among literary and philosophical traditions while closely reading a wide range of texts, Radical Romanticism shows how storytelling is central to the pursuit of justice and flourishing for the human and the more-than-human worlds. Bringing together environmental humanities, literary theory, political theory, and religious studies, this book makes the case for a renewed radical Romanticism, offering urgent resources for a world beset by catastrophe, uncertainty, and despair.
Reviews / Votes
In Radical Romanticism, Mark Cladis argues that Romanticism is not a dead aesthetic movement but an ongoing political and spiritual tradition. With compelling readings of William Wordsworth, W. E. B. Du Bois, Leslie Silko, and others, Cladis shows that radical Romantics sustain ecological, democratic life in diverse societies. This book is a creative contribution to ongoing scholarly conversations in literary studies, religious studies, political theory, and environmental humanities, and it suggests that literature can move people to action, transforming ecologies and spiritualities for a climate-changed world. -- Alda Balthrop-Lewis, author of <i>Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism</i> Stories are all we have, says Leslie Marmon Silko, and landscapes are storied, too. In this important book, Indigeneity, race, and environment braid together to shape a radical Romanticism that is its own story-a way of life and a lens through which to reencounter vitalism and faith, drawing on Silko, Du Bois, Thoreau, and more. A brilliant text for all humanists now. -- Bonnie Honig, author of <i>A Feminist Theory of Refusal</i> Cladis's Radical Romanticism crackles with a bold new story about Romanticism, resisting the notion of the Romantic as a passive admirer of nature's untouched beauty. For radical Romantics, nature's uncertainty, beauty, and mystery fuel political, communal, and environmental justice. By building fresh bridges across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries-and among writers not often placed in conversation-Cladis offers a new public discourse for our planetary future. -- Jonathon Kahn, author of <i>Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois</i> In Radical Romanticism, Mark Cladis offers an energetic new approach to the Romantic literary tradition, meticulously defining and exemplifying what radical Romanticism is, how it works stylistically in an impressively eclectic body of transatlantic and transhistorical literature, and why it matters to recognize this tradition. -- Scott Slovic, coeditor of <i>Nature and Literary Studies</i>More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 230 mm
Width: 153 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
600 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-231-21333-2 (9780231213332)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
09/2025
1st Edition
Columbia University Press
€36.49
Available for download
Person
Mark S. Cladis is the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where he is a faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies, the Center for Environmental Humanities, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative.
Content
Preface; Or, How I Came to Write This Book and What Lies at Its Heart
Introduction
1. Radical Romantic Aesthetics: Wordsworth and Du Bois
2. Into the Wild: Environmental and Racial Justice in Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Du Bois
3. Rousseau's Garden as a World in Which to Live
4. Romanticism, Religion, and Practice: Political and Environmental Implications
5. Dancing on a Flaming World: Du Bois's Poetry and Creative Fiction
6. Ecofeminism and the Expansion and Transformation of Radical Romanticism
7. Leslie Marmon Silko and the Power of Indigenous Storytelling: Healing and Resistance in Defiance of Settler Colonialism
Conclusion: The Work and Promise of Radical Romanticism in a World in Ruins
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
1. Radical Romantic Aesthetics: Wordsworth and Du Bois
2. Into the Wild: Environmental and Racial Justice in Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Du Bois
3. Rousseau's Garden as a World in Which to Live
4. Romanticism, Religion, and Practice: Political and Environmental Implications
5. Dancing on a Flaming World: Du Bois's Poetry and Creative Fiction
6. Ecofeminism and the Expansion and Transformation of Radical Romanticism
7. Leslie Marmon Silko and the Power of Indigenous Storytelling: Healing and Resistance in Defiance of Settler Colonialism
Conclusion: The Work and Promise of Radical Romanticism in a World in Ruins
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index