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Atmospheric Late Romanticism: Babbage, Marx, Ruskin

Atmospheric Late Romanticism: Babbage, Marx, Ruskin One way of describing late Romanticism involves looking at how Romanticism ended. Here, I examine a cluster of epistemological breaks that occurred at the end of the 1830s, and which concerned computers, communism and climate change. As three things that have happened to us but not to the Romantics, these can be recognised as determinate indications of our defining post-Romanticism. I show how ideas, tropes and figures of atmospheric Romanticism were repurposed and transformed in each of these three cases to inspire radically different currents of thought. With Charles Babbage, atmosphere became a computational platform for moral theology; with Karl Marx, it became an epistemological material of social revolution; and with John Ruskin, it became a global infrastructure of scientific self-knowledge. In each case, the break paradoxically involved a formalisation of a Romantic principle: that a description of an atmosphere is also a self-description. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Romanticism Edinburgh University Press

Atmospheric Late Romanticism: Babbage, Marx, Ruskin

Ford, Thomas H.
Romanticism , Volume 27 (2): 14 – Jul 1, 2021
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Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Edinburgh University Press
ISSN
1354-991X
eISSN
1750-0192
DOI
10.3366/rom.2021.0508
Publisher site
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Abstract

One way of describing late Romanticism involves looking at how Romanticism ended. Here, I examine a cluster of epistemological breaks that occurred at the end of the 1830s, and which concerned computers, communism and climate change. As three things that have happened to us but not to the Romantics, these can be recognised as determinate indications of our defining post-Romanticism. I show how ideas, tropes and figures of atmospheric Romanticism were repurposed and transformed in each of these three cases to inspire radically different currents of thought. With Charles Babbage, atmosphere became a computational platform for moral theology; with Karl Marx, it became an epistemological material of social revolution; and with John Ruskin, it became a global infrastructure of scientific self-knowledge. In each case, the break paradoxically involved a formalisation of a Romantic principle: that a description of an atmosphere is also a self-description.

Journal

Romanticism – Edinburgh University Press

Published: Jul 1, 2021

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