Kir Kuiken argues for the existence of a geopoetic literary genre extending from the late eighteenth century to the present and addresses its legacies through works of European Romantic authors and contemporary Caribbean writers. Framed by its origin in geology, geopoetics unfolds the aesthetic and political consequences of the Earth's independence from human existence alongside the realization that this fundamentally independent Earth is also the foundation of all human society. Highlight...

Imagined Sovereignties argues that the Romantics reconceived not just the nature of aesthetic imagination but also the conditions in which a specific form of political sovereignty could be realized through it.Articulating the link between the poetic imagination and secularized sovereignty requires more than simply replacing God with the subjective imagination and thereby ratifying the bourgeois liberal subject. Through close readings of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley, th...

This volume represents the first collection of essays devoted exclusively to Jacques Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars, conducted from 1999 to 2001. The volume includes essays from a range of scholars working in philosophy, law, Francophone studies, and comparative literature, including established Derridians, activist scholars, and emerging scholars. These essays attempt to elucidate and expand upon Derrida's deconstruction of the theologico-political logic of the death penalty in order to...

The essays gathered in Haiti's Literary Legacies unpack the theoretical, historical, and political resonance of the Haitian revolution across a multiplicity of European and American Romanticisms, and include discussion of Haitian, British, French, German, and U.S. American traditions. Often referred to as the only successful slave revolt in history, the revolution that forged Haiti at once fulfilled, challenged, and ultimately surpassed Enlightenment conceptions of freedom and uni...