'A magnificent, thoughtful, moving book. Written with poetic sweep, it+ re-creates a vital era of American history and restores John Reed, the legend, to life. Romantic Revolutionary will long be read as the definitive work about a man who lived an epic life in quest of an ideal.' --Dorothy Samachson, Chicago Daily News
“A splendidly pithy and provocative introduction to the culture of Romanticism.”—The Sunday Times “[Tim Blanning is] in a particularly good position to speak of the arrival of Romanticism on the Euorpean scene, and he does so with a verve, a breadth, and an authority that exceed every expectation.”—National Review From the preeminent historian of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes a superb, concise account of a cultural upheaval that still shapes sensibilities today. A rebellion against the rationality of the Enlightenment, Romanticism was a profound shift in expression that altered the arts and ushered in modernity, even as it championed a return to the intuitive and the primitive. Tim Blanning describes its beginnings in Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, which placed the artistic creator at the center of aesthetic activity, and reveals how Goethe, Goya, Berlioz, and others began experimenting with themes of artistic madness, the role of sex as a psychological force, and the use of dreamlike imagery. Whether unearthing the origins of “sex appeal” or the celebration of accessible storytelling, The Romantic Revolution is a bold and brilliant introduction to an essential time whose influence would far outlast its age. “Anyone with an interest in cultural history will revel in the book’s range and insights. Specialists will savor the anecdotes, casual readers will enjoy the introduction to rich and exciting material. Brilliant artistic output during a time of transformative upheaval never gets old, and this book shows us why.”—The Washington Times “It’s a pleasure to read a relatively concise piece of scholarship of so high a caliber, especially expressed as well as in this fine book.”—Library Journal
Simon Bolivar was the archetypal romantic revolutionary. Born into privilege and nurtured in the Rousseau's philosophy of the Homme Sauvage, it was not until the young colonial visited Europe that the taper of revolution was lit that sent the young man on a death-defying quest to fight for the people of his homeland, and eventually liberate the whole of continental South America. Bolivar's struggle for liberty is a story of extraordinary courage and fortune. Since the age of the Conquistadores, South America was controlled from Spain with an iron grip. The Spanish army brutalised the people while the wealth of the continent was shipped away to Europe. In 1807 he returned to Caracas and joined the resistance movement, declaring independence for Venezuela four years later. He soon gave up politics, however, to search for a military solution, devising the 'Decree of War until Death' in July 1813, and claiming the title El Liberador. Yet once again, after initial victories he found himself fleeing for his life. His final campaign from 1817 to 1821 saw the eventual liberation of Venezuela, Columbia, Equador and Panama. He continued his commitment to liberty with the subsequent conquest of Peru. In 1825, the new nation of Bolivia was created in the spirit that had driven Bolivar himself to achieve so much - revolutionary zeal and enlightenment principles. Nonetheless, by 1828 Bolivar had declared himself a dictator. After assassination attempts and uprisings the liberator was finally hounded from office and eventually died as he waited to go into exile in Europe. Bestselling author of The War of Wars, Robert Harvey bring a lifetime's fascination into Bolivar and explores the complex personality behind the revolutionary. He vividly recreates the story of the campaigns and draws a panoramic portrait of South America at the turning of the Spanish Empire.
Revolutionary Romanticism draws on almost two centuries of intertwined traditions of cultural and political subversion. In this rich collection of writings by artists, scholars, and revolutionaries, the transgressions of the past are recaptured and transvalued for the benefit of the struggles of today and tomorrow. Along the way, new light is shed on the radical sensibilities of Novalis, Friedrich Holderlin, and Friedrich Schlegel while the poetics of Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron, and William Blake are revealed to be profoundly oppositional to the reigning culture. The social romanticism of Jules Michelet, the nineteenth-century historian of the French Revolution, is acclaimed for its visionary, quasi-religious breadth. The Paris Commune is figured by the arch-Romantics Karl Marx, Jules Valles, and Arthur Rimbaud. The all-but-forgotten Bavarian Council Republic of 1919 is recalled, a milieu steeped in Expressionism and anarchism, the matrix out of which B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, emerged-by the skin of his teeth. The romantic outlook of Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, both strongly influenced by Surrealism ("the prehensile tail of Romanticism") is relocated in their absolute negation of the social order. And, at the end of the twentieth century, there's Guy Debord and the Situationist International, the passionate detournement of the Romantic project. Max Blechman writes, "When today aesthetic life is increasingly defined by advertising and corporate culture, and democracy has more to do with the power of private interests than the power of the public imagination, the romantic insistence on the liberatory dimension of aesthetics and on radical democracy may yet prove crucial to contemporary efforts to envision a new political freedom." Revolutionary Romanticism includes Blechman's investigation of the German idealist roots of European Romanticism, Annie Le Brun on the possibility of "romantic women," Peter Marshall on William Blake, Maurice Hindle on the political language of the early English Romantics, Arthur Mitzman on Jules Michelet, Christopher Winks on the Paris Commune, Miguel Abensour on William Morris, Peter Lamborn Wilson on the 1919 Bavarian Workers Council, Michael Lowy on Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, Marie-Dominque Massoni on Surrealism, and Daniel Blanchard on his youthful friendship with Guy Debord.
Winner, 2011 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize, International Conference on Romanticism This book explores the relationship among Romanticism, deconstruction, and Marxism by examining tropes of sensation and sobriety in a set of exemplary texts from Romantic literature and contemporary literary theory. Orrin N. C. Wang explains how themes of sensation and sobriety, along with Marxist-related ideas of revolution and commodification, set the terms of narrative surrounding the history of Romanticism as a movement. The book is both polemical and critical, engaging in debates with modern thinkers such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benn Michaels, and Slavoj Žižek, as well as presenting fresh readings of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, including Wordsworth, Kant, Shelley, Byron, Brontë, and Keats. Romantic Sobriety combines deeply complex, close readings with a broader reflection on Romanticism and its implications for literary study. It will interest scholars who study Romanticism from a number of perspectives, including those interested in bodily and social consumption, the roles of addiction and abstinence in literature, the connection between literary and visual culture, the intersection of critical theory and Romanticism, and the relationships among language, historical knowledge, and political practice.
From social theorist and psychotherapist Rabbi Michael Lerner comes a strategy for a new socialism built on love, kindness, and compassion for one another. Revolutionary Love proposes a method to replace what Lerner terms the "capitalist globalization of selfishness" with a globalization of generosity, prophetic empathy, and environmental sanity. Lerner challenges liberal and progressive forces to move beyond often weak-kneed and visionless politics to build instead a movement that can reverse the environmental destructiveness and social injustice caused by the relentless pursuit of economic growth and profits. Revisiting the hidden injuries of class, Lerner shows that much of the suffering in our society—including most of its addictions and the growing embrace of right-wing nationalism and reactionary versions of fundamentalism—is driven by frustrated needs for community, love, respect, and connection to a higher purpose in life. Yet these needs are too often missing from liberal discourse. No matter that progressive programs are smartly constructed—they cannot be achieved unless they speak to the heart and address the pain so many people experience. Liberals and progressives need coherent alternatives to capitalism, but previous visions of socialism do not address the yearning for anything beyond material benefits. Inspired by Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Carol Gilligan, Revolutionary Love offers a strategy to create the "Caring Society." Lerner details how a civilization infused with love could put an end to global poverty, homelessness, and hunger, while democratizing the economy, shifting to a twenty-eight-hour work week, and saving the life-support system of Earth. He asks that we develop the courage to stop listening to those who tell us that fundamental social transformation is "unrealistic."
The prophetic poetry of slavery and its abolition During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers—enslaved and free—allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility. These Black writers borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism—lyric poetry, prophetic visions--to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. At the same time, they voiced anxieties about the expansion of global capital and US imperial power in the aftermath of slavery. They also focused on the ramifications of slavery's sexual violence. Authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Moses Horton, Albery Allson Whitman, and Joshua McCarter Simpson conceived the Civil War as a revolutionary upheaval on par with Europe's stormy Age of Revolutions. The Black Romantic Revolution proposes that the Black Romantics' cultural innovations have shaped Black radical culture to this day, from the blues and hip hop to Black nationalism and Black feminism. Their expressions of love and rage, grief and determination, dreams and nightmares, still echo into our present.
Now in paperback, the great historian's provocative account of the rise of Romanticism. Combining his incomparable knowledge of English history with an original interpretation of British literature of the late 18th and early nineteenth century, E. P. Thompson traces the intellectual influences and societal pressures that gave rise to the English Romantic movement. Writing with great passion and literary force, Thompson examines the interaction between politics and literature at the beginning of the modern age, focusing in on the turbulent 1790s -- the time of the French and American revolutions -- through the celebrated writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Roderick Beaton re-examines Lord Byron's life and writing through the long trajectory of his relationship with Greece. Beginning with the poet's youthful travels in 1809–1811, Beaton traces his years of fame in London and self-imposed exile in Italy, that culminated in the decision to devote himself to the cause of Greek independence. Then comes Byron's dramatic self-transformation, while in Cephalonia, from Romantic rebel to 'new statesman', subordinating himself for the first time to a defined, political cause, in order to begin laying the foundations, during his 'hundred days' at Missolonghi, for a new kind of polity in Europe – that of the nation-state as we know it today. Byron's War draws extensively on Greek historical sources and other unpublished documents to tell an individual story that also offers a new understanding of the significance that Greece had for Byron, and of Byron's contribution to the origin of the present-day Greek state.