Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination

Working at the juncture of religious studies, political theory, and environmental studies, I interrogate and construct a radical Romantic tradition that supports a normative vision of an environmentally responsive democracy that is deeply embodied by its citizens and embedded in its lands. Having investigated the religious, democratic, and environmental dispositions and ideologies that informed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Romantic literature and subsequent legacies in America, I now show how this multifarious Romantic legacy, which has already shaped our identity and many of our sensibilities, can assist in the ongoing project of cultivating interrelated democratic and environmental theory, belief, and practice.