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Against Sustainability responds to twenty-first-century environmental crisis not by seeking the origins of U.S. environmental problems, but by returning to the nineteenth-century literary, cultural, and scientific contexts that gave rise to many of our most familiar environmental solutions. In readings that juxtapose antebellum and contemporary writers such as Walt Whitman and Lucille Clifton, George Catlin and Louise Erdrich, and Herman Melville and A. S. Byatt, the book reconnects sustainability, recycling, and preservation with nineteenth-century U.S. contexts such as industrial farming, consumerism, slavery, and settler colonial expansion. These readings demonstrate that the paradigms explored are compromised in their attempts to redress environmental degradation because they simultaneously perpetuate the very systems that generate the degradation to begin with. Alongside the chapters that focus on defamiliarization and critique are chapters that reveal that the nineteenth century also gave rise to more unusual and provisional environmentalisms. These chapters offer alternatives to the failed paradigms of recycling and preservation, exploring Henry David Thoreau’s and Emily Dickinson’s joyful, anti-consumerist frugality and Hannah Crafts’s and Harriet Wilson’s radical pet keeping model of living with others. The coda considers zero waste and then contrasts sustainability with functional utopianism, an alternative orienting paradigm that might more reliably guide mainstream U.S. environmental culture toward transformative forms of ecological and social justice. Ultimately, Against Sustainability offers novel readings of familiar literary works that demonstrate how U.S. nineteenth-century literature compels us to rethink our understandings of the past in order to imagine other, more just and environmentally-sound futures.

What are the relationships between the books we read and the communities we share?Common Things explores how transatlantic romance revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth century influenced and were influenced by emerging modern systems of community. Drawing on the work of Washington Irving, Henry Mackenzie, Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Charles Brockden Brown, the book shows how romance promotes a distinctive aesthetics of belonging-a mode of being in common tied to new qualities of the singular. Each chapter focuses on one of these common things-the stain of race, the “property” of personhood, ruined feelings, the genre of a text, and the event of history-and examines how these peculiar qualities work to sustain the coherence of our modern common places. In the work of Horace Walpole and Edgar Allan Poe, the book further uncovers an important and never more timely alternative aesthetic practice that reimagines community as an open and fugitive process rather than as a collection of common things.

This collection of essays takes its title and its point of departure from Walter Benjamin’s concept of the historical constellation, a concept which puts both historical terms—“contemporary” as well as “Romanticism”—in play as period designations and critical paradigms. While the methodological orientations and the objects of analysis are genuinely diverse, each of the essays collected here makes good on a central tenet of Benjamin’s conception of history: These are critics who “grasp the constellation” into which our “own era has formed with a definite earlier one,” in this case the era of Romanticism. The contemporaneity of Romanticism explored or addressed by the essays in this collection is not predicated on Romanticism’s unacknowledged historical or conceptual persistence. Rather, the constellations addressed in these essays regard Romanticism as a decisive and unexpired thought experiment that makes demands on and poses questions for our own “now” time: What is the unlived of the contemporary Romanticism? What has Romanticism’s singular untimeliness bequeathed to futurity? What is Romanticism’s contemporary “redemption value” for painting and politics, philosophy and film?

This book argues for a new understanding of the relationship between Romantic conceptions of the imagination and the emergence of modern forms of political sovereignty. Its main thesis is that the Romantics reconceived not just the nature of the aesthetic imagination, but also the conditions in which a particular form of sovereignty could be realized through it. Engaging in close readings of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley, the book reveals how Romantic authors re-asserted poetic authority in place of divine sovereignty, thereby producing an alternative understanding of the secularization of the political. The book also argues, however, that the Romantics did more than simply replace God as the source of political authority with the subjective imagination; they produced new forms of sovereignty that are no longer modelled on any form of transcendence, divine or human. The book thus aims to re-examine not only our conception of the political significance of Romanticism, but also its continued relevance for our contemporary understanding of the history and development of personal and political sovereignty.

What makes stories about portraits so gripping and unsettling? Portrait Stories argues that it is the ways they articulate the relation between subjectivity and representation. While in pre-nineteenth-century stories the portrait is presented as an unambiguous token of its subject’s already established identity, the stories discussed in this book show subjectivity to be inseparable from representation. At the same time, portraiture highlights the way representation is inflected by particular interests and power relations, often determined by gender as well as class. It is thus in relation to representations shaped by social differences and conflicting interests that the subjectivities of sitter, painter, and viewer are produced in these stories. Through close readings of nineteenth-century short stories and novellas by Poe, James, Hoffmann, Gautier, Nerval, Balzac, Kleist, Hardy, Wilde, Storm, Sand, and Gogol, the book analyzes the way power can accrue to the painter from the act of representation as well as the power the portrait itself, as a sign of its subject’s existence, can have over its viewer. The viewer’s relation to the portrait also problematizes the very act of seeing and with it the way subjectivity is constructed in the field of vision. Methodologically, the book takes the portrait’s commitment to representing the ’mere individual’ (for which it has been routinely devalued) as a model for interpretation, practicing close readings that refuse to sacrifice the difference between and within texts for the sake of general truths.

Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Homelessness, Romanticism argues that at the heart of contemporary biopolitical thinking is an insistent repression of poetry. By returning to the moment at which, at least according to Michel Foucault, biopolitics emerges, and by taking account of the contemporaneous emergence of romanticism, this project renews our understanding of the operations of the politics of the day, while at the same time contesting our assumptions about the relation between aesthetics and politics from romanticism to the present. In order to manifest its argument, the project focuses on a single, exemplary case: the poetry and autobiographical writing of the British poet John Clare (1793–1864), in particular Clare's later writings. Through readings of Clare in combination with a rigorous examination of contemporary theories of biopolitics, in particular, those focused on displacement and exile, sovereignty and nature, the book challenges our understanding of romanticism's political legacies, specifically the belief that romanticism is a direct precursor to the violent nationalisms and redemptive environmentalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book offers an alternative account of many of romanticism's foundational concepts, like home, genius, creativity, and organicism, arguing that it is not poetry but a certain conception of romanticism that leads to misunderstanding. At the same time, the book shows that contemporary critical theories of biopolitics emerge alongside and within the same rhetorical tradition as the romanticism that they denounce, despite repeatedly dismissing the aesthetic or poetic dimensions of power. The book thus exposes a key, unaccounted dimension of the theory of biopolitics, one that compels a rethinking of its critique of poetry and a reconsideration of romanticism and its concepts.

Secular Lyrics interrogates the distinctively individual ways that Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson adapt ancient and renaissance conventions of lyric expression to the developing conditions of their modern context, especially to the heterogeneity of beliefs and believers in a secular society and to the altered or emergent role that literature assumes in a secular age. These poets, in idiosyncratic but related ways, register the pressures of the modern crowd—which Benjamin rightly identified as nineteenth-century poetry’s essential topic—within their poems, where the mass appears as potential readers, as resistant skeptics, as a heterogeneous crowd of contending beliefs and contentious believers. For these poets, the processes of signification rather than the communication of truths become central to their poetry, which in turn becomes an important origin of the modern poetry that in Europe and the United States follows. Each invokes the normative practices that have long characterized Western poetry only to disrupt the audience’s conventional expectations and enliven the reader’s sense of language’s material density and the limits and potentials of modern life.