Romantic Realities (Speculative Realism and British Romanticism)

Speculative realism is one of the most exciting, influential and controversial new branches of philosophy to emerge in recent years. Now, Evan Gottlieb shows that the speculative realism movement bears striking a resemblance to the ideas and beliefs of the best-known British poets of the Romantic era.

Romantic Realities analyses the parallels and echoes between the ideas of the most influential contemporary practitioners of speculative realism and the poetry and poetics of the most innovative Romantic poets. In doing so, it introduces you to the intellectual precedents and contemporary stakes of speculative realism, together with new understandings of the philosophical underpinnings and far-reaching insights of British Romanticism.

Readings include:

• The poetry and poetics of Wordsworth in relation to Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology and Timothy Morton’s dark ecology
• Coleridge’s poems and ideas in relation to Ray Brassier’s philosophical nihilism and Iain Hamilton Grant’s revisionist readings of Schelling
• Shelley’s oeuvre in relation to Quentin Meillassoux’s radical immanentism and Manuel DeLanda’s process ontology
• Byron’s best-known poems in relation to Alain Badiou’s truth procedures and Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory
• Keats’ oeuvre in relation to Levi Bryant’s onticology and Ian Bogost’s alien phenomenology