1st Edition
Romantic Futures Legacy, Prophecy, Temporality
Introduction
Evy Varsamopoulou
Part One: The Future as Legacy
1. ‘As a Modern Production It is Nothing’: Macpherson and the Forging of National Identity
Steve Clark
2. Into the Matrix of Cyberspace: The Survival of Romantic Myth
Naji Oueijan
3. Back to the Future
Mary-Antoinette Smith
Part Two: Visions of the Future
4. Scott’s Seers: Predicting the Future in the Works of Walter Scott
Anna Fancett
5. Baseless Fabric: Joseph Priestley, World Religions, and the Future
Stephen Bygrave
6.Revolutionary Futures
Evy Varsamopoulou
Part Three: The Concept of Futurity
7. The Faith of the Faithless: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Notes for Queen Mab (1813)
Alex Watson
8. From First Man to Last Man: Romanticism’s Futures in Mary Shelley’s Proto-Dystopian Novels
Maria Varsam
9.Romantic Temporalities
Paul Hamilton
Afterword(s): 'Garland of Fragments': Romanticism and Utopia in Dialogue
Evy Varsamopoulou and Maria Varsam
Index
Biography
Evy Varsamopoulou is Associate Professor in Romanticism and Comparative Literature at the University of Cyprus. Her research and publications include articles and book chapters on Romanticism, comparative literature, ecocriticism, film, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. She has published a monograph, The Poetics of the Künstlerinroman and the Aesthetics of the Sublime (Ashgate, 2002; Routledge, 2017), and edited special issues on the European tradition of the artist novel and on the future university for NewComparison (2002) and The European Legacy (2013), respectively. Her current research projects engage with issues of the future, truth, violence, and the environment in literature and film from a comparative perspective.
This book is a peculiar time machine which, via a variety of routes that follow the past’s engagement with futurity, takes us back to the present. It looks back to the works of Macpherson, Blake, Scott, Keats, Mary and P.B. Shelley, and others, in order to look with and through them into the future, including our own times and beyond.
-Eliza Borkowska, Associate Professor, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland
