Lilli Fortmeier
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PhD project: “Anxiety & the Empire: Temporal Tensions, Affectivity, and Cultural Production in the Romantic Age”
My thesis explores the temporal affectivity of cultural production under imperialism in the British Romantic Age (c. 1780-1839). It assumes, with Emily Rohrbach, that:
“Two distinct qualities characterize [the] new conception of time as it marks late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourse: an unprecedented sense of speed or acceleration (with which major historical events take place in succession, for instance) and the idea of an unknowable, unpredictable future.”1
More specifically, my thesis combines theoretical approaches from affect studies and British cultural studies to read anxiety as a structure of feeling which emerges from the tension between various and ostensibly contradictory temporal instincts, all of which respond in equal measure to a historically unprecedented time of crisis in imperial self-fashioning. Expressions of anxiety in this sense may be found in various Romantic discourses, but focal points for this project will be four aspects of Romantic culture which are particularly relevant to imperiality: 1. the liberal ideal of the future in abolitionist writing, 2. nostalgic rurality and configurations of the countryside, 3. the Romantic interpretation of historical decline, and 4. Romantic apocalypticism. I will conclude by critically contextualising these readings of Romantic texts with those 21st-century legacies of empire – as manifest in popular culture and public political discourses – which remain entangled with them.
1 Rohrbach, Emily, Modernity's Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), p. 12.
