Romantic Futures: Legacy, Prophecy, Temporality [Hardcover]

Romantic Futures is a collection which explores the significance of futurity in British Romanticism from a comparative perspective in three defining manifestations: the future as conscious legacy, by which is meant both influences or continuities and the (anticipations of) impact on the future; the future as revealed by prophecy, whether via religious figures or superstitions; and a meditation on the temporality of the future, or the future as a concept. The book brings together a wide range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives: from utopian studies, history, religion, and cultural theory to future studies, neuroscience, video games, and art history. Aiming to increase and diversify current critical engagement and highlight the contemporary relevance of the Romantics multivalent preoccupation with the future, this collection renews the dialogue between Romanticism and our critical relation to its contemporaneity, especially as it speaks to current understandings of the future in the sciences, arts, and humanities.

This book is a peculiar time machine which, via a variety of routes that follow the pasts engagement with futurity, takes us back to the present. It looks back to the works of Macpherson, Blake, Scott, Keats, Mary and P.B. Shelley, and others, in order to look with and through them into the future, including our own times and beyond.

-Eliza Borkowska, Associate Professor, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland

Romantic Futures explores the plurality and diversity of approaches, representations, and conceptions of the future in poetry, fiction, and other prose works of British Romanticism from a comparative and cross-disciplinary perspective

Evy Varsamopoulou is Associate Professor in Romanl3×