About

The Romantic period is a condensation in time when diverse experiences of cultural and global synchronicity emerged into prominence. In view of a sustained interest in meaningful coincidences and simultaneity across generic, disciplinary, and national boundaries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this work is the first edited collection to shed light on the manifold, but understudied, connotations of synchronicity associated with the socio-cultural traditions of Romanticism. The collection is an international, collaborative project that integrates the perspectives of early-career scholars and senior academics based in the UK, continental Europe, and Asia, as they in turn approach the phenomenon of synchronicity not only in Britain but also in continental Europe and the Americas during the Romantic period. This volume advances current research on the concept of synchronicity by integrating literary analysis with the fields of philosophy, ecocriticism, biopoetics, historiography, art history, infrastructure studies, transnationalism, and decolonial studies.

This project is partly funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science as part of the Excellence Strategy of the German Federal and State Governments.

Table of Contents (tentative)

Notes on Contributors
Editor’s Acknowledgements
Introduction
 
Sense and Perception
1          ‘Among all lovely things’: Loveliness in Romanticism
Jessica Fay
2          ‘Organic Harps diversely framed / That tremble into thought’: Synaesthetic Synchronicity in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Eolian Harp’
Philip Lindholm
3          The Meaning of Synchronicity and Synchronised Body in Keats’s Lamia
David Lo
 
Nature and the Human Life
4          ‘Leaves to a tree’: Poetic Synchronicity and ‘Plant-Thinking’ in Keats and Shelley
Amanda Blake Davis
5          The Mallard Thought: John Clare and Henry David Thoreau
Francesca Mackenney
 
Absence and Displacement 
6          ‘Now is Past’: Synchronicity and the Question of Madness in Romantic Asylum Poems
Yimon Lo
7          Merging Asymptotes: Biopoetics and Biofictional Projections in the Recent John Clare Revival
Laura Cernat
 
Letters and Correspondence
8          ‘So, We’ll Go No More A Roving’: Love, Friendship, and Poetry in Byron’s Letters from Venice
Jake R. Phipps
9          Epistolary Synchronicity and the Letters of Thomas Campbell
Amy Wilcockson 
 
Transnational and Transcultural Influences
10        ‘A Prismatic and Many-sided Mirror’: Prometheus and the Poetics of Simultaneity in Shelley, Emerson, and Nietzsche
Mark Sandy
11        The Infrastructural Temporalities of the Széchenyi Chain Bridge
Frederik Van Dam and László Munteán
 
History and Historiography
12        Romantic Epics of Indigenous American Resistance: Synchronicity against Diffusionism in Helen Maria Williams and Robert Southey
Valentina P. Aparicio
13        Here, There, and in All Places at One Time: Synchronicity, Machinery, and Acceleration 
Brecht de Groote
 
Index