Books by Anne McCarthy
Bloomsbury Academic, 2019
Romanticism and Speculative Realism features a range of scholars working at the intersection of l... more Romanticism and Speculative Realism features a range of scholars working at the intersection of literary poetics and philosophy. It considers how the writing of the Romantic era reconceptualizes the human imagination, the natural world, and the language that correlates them in radical ways that can advance current speculative debates concerning new ontologies and new materialisms.
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.
University of Toronto Press, 2018
Whether the rapt trances of Romanticism or the corpse-like figures that confounded Victorian scie... more Whether the rapt trances of Romanticism or the corpse-like figures that confounded Victorian science and religion, nineteenth-century depictions of bodies in suspended animation are read as manifestations of broader concerns about the unknowable in Anne C. McCarthy’s Awful Parenthesis. Examining various aesthetics of suspension in the works of poets such as Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti, McCarthy shares important insights into the nineteenth-century fascination with the sublime.
Attentive to differences between "Romantic" and "Victorian" articulations of suspension, Awful Parenthesis offers a critical alternative to assumptions about periodization. While investigating various conceptualizations of suspension, including the suspension of disbelief, suspended animation, trance, paralysis, pause, and dilatation, McCarthy provides historically-aware close readings of nineteenth-century poems in conversation with prose genres that include devotional works, philosophy, travel writing, and periodical fiction. Awful Parenthesis reveals the cultural obsession with the aesthetics of suspension as a response to an expanding, incoherent world in crisis, one where the audience is both active participant and passive onlooker.
Papers by Anne McCarthy
Essays in Romanticism, 2018
With its strange blend of philosophical argument and intimate revelation, William Godwin’s Memoir... more With its strange blend of philosophical argument and intimate revelation, William Godwin’s Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft has long occupied a notorious place in literary history. Less attention, however, has been paid to the more subtle—yet equally crucial—fractures in the text that result from what is, in essence, a task of impossible representation. Godwin, whose presence in Wollstonecraft’s life was a relatively recent development, sets out to chronicle the life of his beloved, yet struggles to reconcile the woman and the author. Unable fully to bridge the aporia between “Mary” and “Wollstonecraft,” but committed to a faithful rendering of her often contradictory subject positions, Godwin creates a text riven by instabilities of time and reference that are themselves the result of his fidelity to his subject.
PMLA, 2017
In October 2012, the professional daredevil Felix Baumgartner performed a nine-minute "space jump... more In October 2012, the professional daredevil Felix Baumgartner performed a nine-minute "space jump" that broke a number of records and was broadcast to millions of viewers on YouTube. I place this stunt within an aesthetic I call the Red Bull sublime, after the energy drink company that sponsors these kinds of events, and, further, show that the sublimity of falling has a history that goes back to Coleridge and Keats.
Winner of the Best Essay Prize for 2017, awarded by the Keats-Shelley Association of America
The poem about a mountain turns out to be an exercise in staring into the abyss. But in a good, i... more The poem about a mountain turns out to be an exercise in staring into the abyss. But in a good, if lightly speculative-realist-avant-la-lettre way.
Book Chapters by Anne McCarthy
Keats's Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives, 2019
This chapter traces the intersection between the language of Keatsian negative capability and the... more This chapter traces the intersection between the language of Keatsian negative capability and the discourse of Buddhism in its ongoing encounters with Western traditions. Although largely associated with the Beat Movement, Buddhist thinkers from both the East and West, including D. T. Suzuki and Stephen Batchelor, have drawn on Romantic concepts in general and Keats in particular to articulate spiritual experience and meditation practice. The second half of the essay examines the work of Reginald Horace Blyth, particularly Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, as an exemplar of a ‘negatively capable’ reading practice attentive to resonances between textual traditions that attempts to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western spirituality.
A short essay of mine that appears in _Jacques Derrida: Key Concepts_, edited by Claire Colebrook... more A short essay of mine that appears in _Jacques Derrida: Key Concepts_, edited by Claire Colebrook (Routledge, 2015)
The Comics of Charles Schulz: The Good Grief of Modern Life
My contribution to the collection, The Comics of Charles Schulz: The Good Grief of Modern Life (e... more My contribution to the collection, The Comics of Charles Schulz: The Good Grief of Modern Life (ed. Jared Gardner and Ian Gordon), forthcoming from the University of Mississippi Press in August 2017. I argue, more or less, that there is a sublime in Peanuts and that it emerges over the course of the 41 Sunday strips that contain some variation on the gag where Lucy pulls the ball away from Charlie Brown.
Uploads
Books by Anne McCarthy
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.
Attentive to differences between "Romantic" and "Victorian" articulations of suspension, Awful Parenthesis offers a critical alternative to assumptions about periodization. While investigating various conceptualizations of suspension, including the suspension of disbelief, suspended animation, trance, paralysis, pause, and dilatation, McCarthy provides historically-aware close readings of nineteenth-century poems in conversation with prose genres that include devotional works, philosophy, travel writing, and periodical fiction. Awful Parenthesis reveals the cultural obsession with the aesthetics of suspension as a response to an expanding, incoherent world in crisis, one where the audience is both active participant and passive onlooker.
Papers by Anne McCarthy
Winner of the Best Essay Prize for 2017, awarded by the Keats-Shelley Association of America
Book Chapters by Anne McCarthy
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.
Attentive to differences between "Romantic" and "Victorian" articulations of suspension, Awful Parenthesis offers a critical alternative to assumptions about periodization. While investigating various conceptualizations of suspension, including the suspension of disbelief, suspended animation, trance, paralysis, pause, and dilatation, McCarthy provides historically-aware close readings of nineteenth-century poems in conversation with prose genres that include devotional works, philosophy, travel writing, and periodical fiction. Awful Parenthesis reveals the cultural obsession with the aesthetics of suspension as a response to an expanding, incoherent world in crisis, one where the audience is both active participant and passive onlooker.
Winner of the Best Essay Prize for 2017, awarded by the Keats-Shelley Association of America