Radical Romanticism

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.

• Preface; Or, How I Came to Write This Book and What Lies at Its HeartIntroduction1. Radical Romantic Aesthetics: Wordsworth and Du Bois2. Into the Wild: Environmental and Racial Justice in Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Du Bois3. Rousseau’s Garden as a World in Which to Live4. Romanticism, Religion, and Practice: Political and Environmental Implications5. Dancing on a Flaming World: Du Bois’s Poetry and Creative Fiction6. Ecofeminism and the Expansion and Transformation of Radical Romanticism7. Leslie Marmon Silko and the Power of Indigenous Storytelling: Healing and Resistance in Defiance of Settler ColonialismConclusion: The Work and Promise of Radical Romanticism in a World in RuinsAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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.