Romantic Reconfigurations

"Michele Speitz offers a compelling and timely expansion of our understanding of the Romantic sublime to encompass the fascination and fear engendered by new technologies. The book offers an important genealogical account of the concept of technology as both continuous with pre-industrial innovations in machinery and engineering and as anticipating the post-industrial developments with which we are all contending today. The counterintuitive, original, and compelling insight of The Romantic Sublime and Representations of Technology is that the category of nature-so central to Romantic era literature and to the disciplinary history of Romanticism itself-needs to be understood as arising in conjunction, and in dynamic interdependence with remarkable and unnerving technological changes. Through original interpretations of key figures including Erasmus Darwin, Robert Southey, John Keats, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley, Speitz tracks an anti-Promethean counter-plot within Romanticism that ought to unsettle received ideas of how writers and thinkers of the period grappled with the limits of human ingenuity and invention, and imagined the cultural collaboration of art with science." Professor Nancy Yousef, Rutgers University

"A rich contribution to our understanding of Romantic poetry, its technological imaginary and the aesthetics of the sublime that created ambivalent perceptions of shared, therefore never fully controlled, agency among nature, machines, and humanity. The book's main argument about the technological, material, and infrastructural sublimes is powerful, and its readings of the poetry of techne superbly nuanced. Plus, wait for Speitz's piercing insight near the end on the 'inexorable intimacy' of the poets' baring of human limitations and open-ended vulnerability in near relations with the technological sublime. It surprised me, and left me utterly persuaded." Professor Alan Liu, University of Santa Barbara, California

"This book crucially unites literature with mechanical and civil engineering. Expertly building on work by Leo Marx, Perry Miller, and David E. Nye on the technological sublime, Speitz provides a compelling narrative. Discussing Romantic poets including Keats, Shelley, and Southey, Speitz argues for an appreciation of the similarity between the endeavors of writers and engineers." Professor John Gardner, Anglia Ruskin University