ABSTRACT
Wild Romanticism approaches the relationship between wilderness and Romanticism both as a matter of history and as a matter of conceptual co-creation, while challenging the idea that the wild is something history has moved beyond, or which persists in the present only as nostalgia. The Romantics certainly found it to be both, whether in faraway geographies, some pieced together from books alone, or in the immediate contexts of their lived experience—in paths walked, gardens worked, worlds wilded. For writers of Anglo-European Romanticism, the ongoing relationship reveals varying levels of attunement and, in turn, shifting understandings of what constitutes, and how best to live in, a “community of life”—a challenge, we hasten to add, in which twenty-first-century readers are likewise vitally implicated. Romantic-era audiences, for example, owed a burgeoning lexical catalogue of elevated emotions—and perhaps a disposition to the emotions themselves—to the mapping of the sublime.
