Afterword. Romantic Futurities: Onwards!

Opting for “Romantic Futurities” as the theme of the BARS 2020 conference, the forward-thinking organizers—Colette Davies, Amanda Blake Davis, and Paul Stephens—invited postgraduates and early career Romanticists to consider at least two questions: How did Romantic writers envision the future, and to what extent is our own sense of futurity—or could it be—shaped by theirs? The essays in this volume address the former question most of all. Rayna Rosenova’s essay does so by revisiting poetry’s engagement with history, complicating ideas of moral progress at the intersection of grand historical narratives and “little” narratives on the scale of the individual. Amanda Blake Davis’s essay turns to the past in the form of Plato’s writings and Percy Shelley’s translations of them to shed light on Shelley’s contemplation of a future state in its shifting between skepticism and idealism, while Simon Clewes brings in the biology of blood ties to show how William Godwin Jr.’s novel Transfusion presents an incipient version of Judith Butler’s theory of transness. Similarly concerned with Romantic biological science, Tara Lee sees Blake’s “descriptions” of fibres and globules as paving the way for modern cell theory and theories of the organism: “What is now prov’d was once only imagined,” as Blake himself put it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In another take on Romantic-period material, Colette Davies’s sparkling essay illuminates how the novelist Eliza Parsons draws on a cultural discourse about jewelry to show the value of imitation in the writing of novels, challenging a literary cultural opposition between imitation and originality that denigrates the former. Finally, Michael Gamer’s essay explores exciting intersections between military, scientific, and theatre history, modeling new ways forward in unexplored interdisciplinary approaches to the Romantic period. Theatrical productions depicting the South Seas on the London stage frequently represented new military and scientific discoveries, and Gamer’s essay itself demonstrates how asking the big questions, while attending to historical and visual detail, not only can continue to expand our understanding of a conventional archive of Romanticism but also might extend what one considers to constitute—or be relevant to—“Romanticism.” Perhaps because it can seem so malleable—at moments infinitely expansive and abundant, at others fleeting—time has been an enduring preoccupation of Romantic studies since its inception, whether those concerns have been formulated as the concepts of memory, history, or prophecy; an elusive or inescapable present; or a dystopian, utopian, or unforeseeable future. The choice of “Romantic futurities” as the theme for the BARS 2020 conference was timely, given a striking tilt toward the future in some of the most notable work of late in Romantic studies. Recent book-length studies have approached the matter of futurity in new ways, and this work represents some of the most exciting and innovative approaches to the field. I am thinking, for example, of books by David Sigler, Christopher Bundock, Jonathan Sachs, Jacques Khalip, Anahid Nersessian, Sophie Laniel-Musitelli, and Kevis Goodman, to name only a few. My own work on this topic in my first book focused on how Romantic writers envisioned futurity as unpredictable and epistemologically uncertain, situating those imaginings in relation to the intellectual history and historiography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain and Europe. It was not lost on me, therefore, that the experience of time that Romantic writers had wrestled with was one that the past year has brought home to all of us. More specifically, that the Covid-19 pandemic arrived between the initial planning of the BARS 2020 conference and the conference event itself enacted a significant change in historical situation that no one, so it seems, could have foreseen. Its extent …