Introduction to “Romantic Futurities”

Futurity encroaches pervasively upon Romantic-period authors’ writings, inspiring both the utopian, perfectibilian hope for a future state and the fear of repeating past downfalls and failed revolutions. Between moments of doubt and disappointment, Mary Wollstonecraft’s “anticipat[ion of] the future improvement of the world” is sustained by her imagination’s enduring ability to “sketch futurity in glowing colours” (68 and 87). But futurity also darkens the present. As Emily Rohrbach makes clear, “Romantic-period writers understood their world to be shadowed by a dark futurity, even inhabited by it” (1). This understanding is cognately expressed in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s claim that “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present” (701). Between shadows and gleams, futurity occupies Romantic thought. This special issue’s topic and title, “Romantic Futurities”, is taken from the British Association for Romantic Studies’ 2020 Early Career and Postgraduate Conference, which was arranged to take place at Keats House, London. We could not have anticipated the extent to which the theme would become apposite in the spring of 2020. The outbreak of Covid-19 hit academia hard, as it did for many industries, professions, and vocations across the world. Universities, libraries, and archives shut their doors. Research trips and in-person conferences were cancelled, and the stereotype of the isolated and solitary academic became an unpleasant reality for many. To stave off researcher isolation, “Romantic Futurities” was transformed into a virtual conference, and the conference website hosted 380 visitors and 9,200 total views in June 2020. This conference urged, alongside studies of futurity in Romantic writings, reflections upon the historical future, the anticipatory future, posterity, reconsiderations and reformulations of the canon, and the future of the field of Romantic Studies. The field of Romantic Studies is inherently bound up with discussions of identity and canonicity. Identity and canonicity are symbiotic, vexed and intertwined; as Michael Gamer writes in Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry, “there is no certain way of knowing the future regard of readers or posterity; when one can only inscribe one’s claims for notice by assembling out of existing works a unified body capable of standing in for the author” (7). The articles in this special issue are largely drawn from the “Romantic Futurities” conference, and offer new approaches to texts, forms, and individuals, shedding light on individuals and texts which traditionally have lain outside of the canon. We are grateful to the editors of Romanticism on the Net for giving us the opportunity to co-edit this special issue and showcase the work of early-career researchers alongside leading scholars in our field. These articles indicate that new reflections on and revisitations of Romantic texts and individuals, occasioned both by modern rediscoveries and the tensions released in clashes between historical logics and our contemporary moment, will help to ensure the field of Romantic Studies has a dynamic and promising future. Identity is brought to the fore through a range of perspectives in Simon Clewes’ “‘Albert’s soul looked forth from the organs of Madeline’: Anticipating Transness in William Godwin Jr.’s Transfusion (1835),” where Godwin Jr.’s identity as a late Romantic is coupled with an anticipation of transness in Transfusion. Clewes draws out a trans narrative within Godwin Jr.’s only novel, wherein the act of a blood transfusion between Albert and his sister Madeline becomes a means of scrutinising the binary gender construct. Modern trans and gender theory are employed alongside the novel’s contemporary medical context and biographical implications, as Clewes presents Godwin Jr.’s neglected Transfusion alongside his half-sister’s seminal work, Frankenstein, focusing in particular upon the figure …