Papers by Chris Washington
Norton Critical Edition of The Last Man , 2024
Buy the book here: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393887822
Nonbinary Jane Austen , 2024
Buy the book here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517917586/nonbinary-jane-austen/
Literature Compass, Sep 1, 2015
My essay surveys two recent philosophical strains of thoughts, Speculative Realism and Object-Ori... more My essay surveys two recent philosophical strains of thoughts, Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology, in order to show their relevance to Romantic literature and culture, and the humanities more widely. I explain how Quentin Meillassoux, in his book After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, targets “correlationism,” the notion that there is no access to the world except by the human mind, as the defining problem of modern thought. Romanticist Timothy Morton, springboarding from Graham Harman's Meillassoux-inspired Object-Oriented Ontology, theorizes what he calls a “hyperobject,” a non-localized object like climate change that disturbs and disrupts the supposed connection between human being and worldly phenomenon. These theories, I show, intersect with Romantic apocalyptic traditions that foresee a future paradise brought on by human action. As I read it, though, Meillassoux's Speculative Realism and Morton's hyperobjects shine a light on the largely ignored, post-apocalyptic aspects of Romantic literature in works like Shelley's “Mont Blanc.” I argue that Romantic post-apocalypticism relies on Romantic irony to root us in a temporality of the present rather than a deferred vision of a utopian future.
Studies in Romanticism, Sep 1, 2022
European Romantic Review, Jan 2, 2020
Studies in Romanticism, 2017
Romantic Revelations shows that the nonhuman is fundamental to Romanticism’s political responses ... more Romantic Revelations shows that the nonhuman is fundamental to Romanticism’s political responses to climatic catastrophes. Exploring what he calls "post-apocalyptic Romanticism," Chris Washington intervenes in the critical conversation that has long defined Romanticism as an apocalyptic field. "Apocalypse" means "the revelation of a perfected world," which sees Romanticism’s back-to-nature environmentalism as a return to paradise and peace on earth. Romantic Revelations, however, demonstrates that the destructive climate change events of 1816, "the year without a summer," changed Romantic thinking about the environment and the end of the world. Their post-apocalyptic visions correlate to the beginning of the Anthropocene, the time when humans initiated the possible extinction of their own species and potentially the earth. Rather than constructing paradises where humans are reborn or human existence ends, the later Romantics are interested in how to survive in the ashes after great social and climatic global disasters. Romantic Revelations argues that Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, John Clare, and Jane Austen sketch out a post-apocalyptic world that, in contrast to the sunnier Romantic narratives, is paradoxically the vision that offers us hope. In thinking through life after disaster, Washington contends that these authors craft an optimistic vision of the future that leads to a new politics.
Journal of British Studies, 2018
Derrida today, May 1, 2010
Romantic Revelations shows that the nonhuman is fundamental to Romanticism’s political responses ... more Romantic Revelations shows that the nonhuman is fundamental to Romanticism’s political responses to climatic catastrophes. Exploring what he calls "post-apocalyptic Romanticism," Chris Washington intervenes in the critical conversation that has long defined Romanticism as an apocalyptic field. "Apocalypse" means "the revelation of a perfected world," which sees Romanticism’s back-to-nature environmentalism as a return to paradise and peace on earth. Romantic Revelations, however, demonstrates that the destructive climate change events of 1816, "the year without a summer," changed Romantic thinking about the environment and the end of the world. Their post-apocalyptic visions correlate to the beginning of the Anthropocene, the time when humans initiated the possible extinction of their own species and potentially the earth. Rather than constructing paradises where humans are reborn or human existence ends, the later Romantics are interested in how to survive in the ashes after great social and climatic global disasters. Romantic Revelations argues that Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, John Clare, and Jane Austen sketch out a post-apocalyptic world that, in contrast to the sunnier Romantic narratives, is paradoxically the vision that offers us hope. In thinking through life after disaster, Washington contends that these authors craft an optimistic vision of the future that leads to a new politics.
Routledge eBooks, Jun 8, 2021
Liverpool University Press eBooks, Aug 31, 2020
The judicial bestiary at the heart of eighteenth-century politics has long been evident in Enligh... more The judicial bestiary at the heart of eighteenth-century politics has long been evident in Enlightenment social contract debates, as Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics show. In this essay, I argue that Wollstonecraft is nonetheless the first thinker of ‘true’ werewolf out-lawry in her final novel, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman and in her letters to Godwin. In the novel, Wollstonecraft leverages what we now call new materialism as a feminist critique of heteropatriarchal society. Wollstonecraft’s new materialist thinking also scrambles gender across even human and nonhuman distinctions. To counter microcosmic familial and macrocosmic state heteropatriarchy, Wollstonecraft theorizes what I am calling, following the example of wolves and werewolves, not a family but a ‘pack’. The pack manifests as new spacetimes through what Karen Barad terms “quantum entanglements” that produce love between subjects and subjects but that never strives to reproduce binaristic pairings that reproduce the sovereign family. A pack, as Wollstonecraft’s texts demonstrate, emerges from processes of co-creation that iterate new subjects and objects without dynamic power structures structured around stable gender identities or human and nonhuman power relations.
European Romantic Review, Oct 29, 2014
My essay intervenes in ecocritical readings of John Clare by tracking how enclosure dramatically ... more My essay intervenes in ecocritical readings of John Clare by tracking how enclosure dramatically altered the way he viewed the relations between humans and animals and shaped his later poetry. I argue that enclosure was biopolitical in nature, establishing, for Clare, distinctively estranging and violent modes of interaction between humans and animals. I track how Clare's poetry, from his early birds' nest poems to “The Badger” sonnet sequence, exhibits a differential ethical awareness, stimulated by the changing ecologies he observes, about animals. I show how his later poem, “The Badger,” exploits the fundamental paradox of prosopopoeia – its chiasmatic marriage of the human and non-human – to issue an ethical imperative that humans examine the violent ways in which they observe, describe, and treat animals or risk acceding to enclosure's biopolitical distancing effect between human and animal life.
Mr. Steven Moberly, Student Director of West Nile Virus Program Clark and Harrison Counties paid ... more Mr. Steven Moberly, Student Director of West Nile Virus Program Clark and Harrison Counties paid intern, supervised trapping, sorting and identified mosquitoes, Research Fellow. Mr. Tim Deatrick, Laboratory Assistant, Author and Service Volunteer
Romanticism and Speculative Realism, 2019
Material Transgressions, 2020
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Papers by Chris Washington
“Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, in many ways as prescient as Shelley’s first novel and one of the first great works of dystopian fiction, has warranted a Norton edition for some time. In Washington’s hands we finally have it. Thoroughly annotated and scrupulously situating Shelley’s third novel within its both historical and contemporary cultural and critical contexts, this fine edition sets a high bar for the future study of Shelley’s writing. Washington has given us an invaluable resource and guide for academic readers, from undergraduates to senior scholars, but also an excellent primer for nonacademic audiences.” —Joel Faflak, Western University, Canada
Romantic Revelations argues that Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, John Clare, and Jane Austen sketch out a post-apocalyptic world that, in contrast to the sunnier Romantic narratives, is paradoxically the vision that offers us hope. In thinking through life after disaster, Washington contends that these authors craft an optimistic vision of the future that leads to a new politics.
In their wide-ranging examinations of canonical and non-canonical romantic writers, the scholars gathered here rethink the connections between the human and non-human world to envision speculative modes of social being and ecological politics. Spanning historical and national frameworks-from historical romanticism to contemporary post-romantic ecology, and from British and German romanticism to global modernity-these essays examine life in all its varied forms in, and beyond, the Anthropocene.