This book remakes the map of Romanticism, offering innovative new ways to read the early-19th-century world and its historical reverberations. Drawing on Romanticism's inherent instability, the essays collectively present a rhizomatic reading of the “romantic” as a way to unmake traditional methods of reading and interpreting. This powerful affirmation of the global is a particularly useful intervention at a time when that concept is under increasing attack.

Padma Rangarajan, Associate Professor of English, University of California, Riverside, USA

Departing from approaches to Romanticism and the global that take Europe as point of origin, this handbook offers a guide to reading global literature and culture in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century as a set of heterogeneous engagements with imperial and colonialist pressures and aesthetic negotiations with migrating forms and ideas. Drawing on methods in the study of material culture, environmental studies, critical race theory, indigenous studies, and deconstruction, among other ways of reading, the essays in the collection shed light on the emergence of the “global” out of dynamic processes of translation and hybridization as well as mistranslation and erasure. By putting well-known modes and genres such as pastoral, love lyric, elegy, topographical poetry, and praise poetry on the move, the volume gives students and scholars fresh eyes with which to view both Romanticism as well as the history of our global present.

Emily Sun, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, Barnard College, USA