In order to promote new forms of thinking about posthumanism, my research paper would like to focus on the extent to which John Keats’s theories of artistic creation seem to point beyond traditionally (European-centred) Romantic traditions. In particular, my paper aims to combine ecocritical explorations of Keatsian ecosystems (Bate 2000; Scott 2014; Clark 2015; Henning 2018) with new materialist approaches that foreground the interconnectedness of the various (human as well as nonhuman) entities inhabiting ecosystems. In particular, this paper would like to explore the potentiality that Keats’s ideas on poetic receptivity and creation may have for an aesthetic theory that goes beyond human exceptionalism. Relying on recent studies on the importance of Keats’s medical background (de Almeida 1991; Roe 2017), Keatsian receptivity and his notions of ‘negative capability’ and ‘material sublime’ will be placed in the context of medical and materially-oriented discussions of heightened sensibility and expanded sympathy, which emphasise the intersubjective orientation of the nervous system (Bassiri 2013). For Keats, the creative process is inseparable from the enhancement of sympathy: the chameleon-like poet “is continually in for and filling some other body” (Letters, 210) in a yearning that is not just expressive of the might of human mental powers, but rather strives for the dissolution of the boundaries of the self so as to promote the identification with human as well as nonhuman and even inanimate entities (for example a sparrow, or a billiard ball). By so doing, Keats’s aesthetic theory rejects the notion of “the Wordsworthian, egotistical sublime” (Letters, 210) and embraces instead the conception of environmental relations founded on interdependency and mutual shaping, in ways that seem to anticipate ecocritical notions of ‘transcorporeality’ and ‘intra-activity’ (Alaimo 2010) among human and nonhuman beings, and their collective constitution of the world. While in Keats’s aesthetic theory and poetry the dissolution of individual boundaries is never far from the risks of pathology, his ideas about receptivity contribute in significant ways to the de-essentialist perspective that is crucial to any discussion of posthumanism. By focusing on extracts from Keats’s letters dealing with his theory of poetic receptivity and creation and on the environmental intersubjective relations to be found in his poetry (the Odes but also some of his narrative poems), this paper intends to argue for the relevance of Keats’s works for the de-centering of the self that preludes to new possibilities for the human and post-human. 

This presentation will bring together Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (1798) and The White Doe of Rylstone; Or, The Fate of the Nortons (1807/1815) into a long-overdue conversation. After all, these “bookend” poems – the former being the very first poem appearing in the sequence of the original 1798 collection of Lyrical Ballads and the latter being, according to Wordsworth, the final lyrical ballad that he authored – have surprisingly much in common. Both are adapted literary ballads from Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) – “The Wandering Jew” and the “Rising of the North,” respectively, that center a non-human character, the albatross and the white doe, to foreground didactic messages about the sanctity of all living beings in the natural world. Each is also structured formally as a seven-part frame narrative whose plots about pilgrimages advance cyclically even beyond their final lines: the mariner will continue to tell his tale and the doe will journey from Rylstone to Bolton Priory to make its weekly sabbath appearance. As both begin and end with a narrator ruminating on past tragic events, parts two through six track that previous experience (the mariner’s travails at sea and the downfall of the Norton family), employing gothic tropes through the appearance of haunted ships, sailors rising from the dead, or spectral visions of phantasms. In this paper, however, I wish to investigate specifically how both poems of tragedy and hope curiously operate as generic experiments. Each poem methodically distances itself from the particularity of literary traditions, including romance, elegy, legend, lyric, and balladry, while also exploring a deep interest in establishing alternative collective bodies outside of the conventional structures of organized religion. More specifically, in pushing their lyrical and balladic boundaries, both poems present what I call a hymnic mode, a process by which each poem's culminating point of lyric and exilic transformation is linked with the communal presentation of a hymn. In other words, when each lyrical ballad becomes specifically hymnic, I suggest that the form transmutes by expanding the personal or individual voice of the poet into an interpersonal and communal/plural mode of expression. Ultimately, I propose that both “The Rime” and The White Doe continually reaffirm their shifting power paradigms and revisionary modes of historiography and testimony through their recursive structures: both repeatedly underscore their radical ambitions, which include, I will suggest, their representations of minoritarian communities as well as the post-humanist propositions on which each work is fundamentally grounded.

The presentation proposes to examine the invention (or reconfiguration) of Enlightenment humanism in the nineteenth century through the triangulation among Europe, Asia and America. The paper will look at the works of a number of nineteenth-century transatlantic Romantic writers, such as William Wordsworth’s sonnet “The Banished Negroes” (1802) and “The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement” (1809), Emily Dickinson’s “Civilization – spurns – the Leopard!” (1862) and “Color – Caste – Denomination –” (1864), and Helen Hunt Jackson’s “The Story of Boon” (1875) and Ramona (1884), rethinking the Romantic conceptualization of the human as a liberal subject and its translation, transmission, and transformation embedded in the racialized comparative paradigm across the transatlantic and transpacific literary world. Building on what Lisa Lowe calls “the intimacies of four continents” (2015), the paper explores the interconnectedness among a number of momentous geo-political conflicts, such as the French Revolution, the Sino-Anglo Opium War, the Mexico-American War, the American Civil War, and the Russo-Circassian War, and see how those poems encapsulate the enmeshed relationships among trades, peoples, and ideas, between racialized politics and the Romantic ideas about liberty, democracy and civilization. By looking at the representation of humanity in relation to the geo-political emergencies of the time, the essay intends to show how the notion of liberal humanism in Romantic writing continues to be challenged, subverted or expanded, and reconstructed.