Common Measures Romanticism And The Groundlessness Of Community Joseph Albernaz by Joseph Albernaz 9781503639720, 9781503639737, 150363972X, 1503639738 instant download after payment.

Amidst the violent expropriation of the commons, Romantic writers including the Wordsworths, Clare, Hölderlin, and the revolutionary abolitionist Robert Wedderburn reimagined the forms of their own lives through literature to conceive community as groundless, a disposition toward radically open forms of sharing—including with nonhuman beings—without recourse to any collective identity. Both a poetics and ethics, groundless community names an everyday sociality that surges beneath and against the enclosures of property and identity, binding us to the movements of the earth.

Unearthing Romanticism's intersections with the history of communism and the general strike, Albernaz also demonstrates how Romantic literature's communal imagination reverberates through later theories of community in Bataille, Derrida, Nancy, Moten, and others. With sharp close readings, new historical constellations, and innovative theoretical paradigms, Common Measures recasts the relationship of the Romantic period to the basic terms of modernity.

Acknowledgments

Introduction. All Things Common

One. Singularity à deux: Rousseau

Two. Homeward Unbound: The Wordsworths

Three. Nonsovereign Circulations: William Blake

Interlude. Sunray of the Negative: Blake and Bataille

Four. Of Weeds and Worlds: John Clare

Five. To Strike the Root: Robert Wedderburn

Coda. Communism of Spirits

Notes

Index