Join us for " Lights Out: Sensations of the Non-Natural in Romantic Poetry" with Professor Orrin Wang of the University of Maryland.

Lights Out: Sensations of the Non-Natural in Romantic Poetry

British Romantic literature is often described as a celebratory form of nature poetry. Nature, however, does not stand alone in Romantic poets’ writings, but is always in social or philosophic negotiation with its Other: either the mind, the city, or the nightmares of history that denizens of the early nineteenth century encountered. Looking at such poets as William Wordsworth and John Keats, this talk will review this more complicated Romantic use of nature, culminating in a reading of Keats’s famous poem, “Ode to a Nightingale” not as the musings of a solitary individual in nature but as an account of the attractions of a burgeoning London nightlife.

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Donations are also appreciated. You can support our programming with a suggested donation of $10. If you'd like to make a donation, choose the "donation ticket" option while purchasing tickets.

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Orrin N. C. Wang is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research considers how much the poetic, philosophical, and social imagination of Romantic-period writing founds contemporary thought and culture. He is the author of Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996) and Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011), which won the 2011 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize, and editor of Frankenstein in Theory: A Critical Anatomy (Bloomsbury, 2021). His most recent book is the forthcoming Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism, (Fordham UP, 2022), which explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and non-print media, both the print, pictorial art, and theater of that era as well as communicative technologies invented afterward, including photography, film, video, and digital screens. Wang is also the General editor of Romantic Circles and recipient of the 2020 Keats Shelley Association of America Distinguished Scholar Award.