This chapter examines Shelley’s images of the collapse of human civilizations and the colonization of their ruins by a darkly resurgent nature. In particular, it places Shelley’s fascination with civilizational collapse and natural overgrowth in the context of recent conceptions of “rewilding.” It argues that “rewilding” as currently conceived by its leading advocates remains an irreducibly human project, whereas Shelleyan overgrowth conceives of a resurgent nature that both occludes and darkly perpetuates the ruins of humanity. A number of key moments in Shelley’s work are central here: his description in his preface to Prometheus Unbound of the situation of the composition of that poem; a fragment of 1818, “Flourishing vine, whose kindling clusters glow”; and the description in Adonais of “Desolation’s bones.” Through close readings of these episodes, the chapter shows that Shelleyan overgrowth represents what we may call a “dark rewilding” – which is for us, as it was for Shelley, a future that human civilization increasingly appears to anticipate. Shelley anticipates many of the conceptual and ethical complexities of today’s rewilding, articulating instead a more ambivalent, less obviously hopeful conception of overgrowth as the eerie perpetuation of the ruins of a disappeared humanity.

This chapter opens with a discussion of Pater’s repurposing of his ‘Romanticism’ essay as the ‘Postscript’ to Appreciations, focusing on the consequences of the paratextual status of this piece in relation to the preceding essays in the volume. Turning to the conception of ‘romanticism’ advanced in the ‘Postscript’, the chapter explores Pater’s non-English examples of romantic writing and what they may tell us about his understanding of English literature and its study. It also touches on a number of responses to Pater’s work, some tacit and venerable, such as T. E. Hulme’s ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, others more avowed and recent, such as Angela Leighton’s appreciations of aspects of Pater’s style. At a number of points, it examines the verbal peculiarities of the Postscript, both to indicate its difference from the earlier ‘Romanticism’ essay and to bring out certain features of Pater’s habits of thinking. The chapter ends with a discussion of the aims of the coda Pater added to ‘Romanticism’ and with which he completed the ‘Postscript’ – and thereby, the whole of Appreciations.

There are numerous records of Byron and Shelley’s discussions, including, perhaps above all, Shelley’s brilliant conversation poem, Julian and Maddalo, in which Shelley’s ‘Byron’ is Count Maddalo and Shelley’s ‘Shelley’ is Julian. Like the conversation of Julian and Maddalo, the conversation with which I want to begin this consideration of the overlapping poetries and poetics of Byron and Shelley may or may not have happened quite as reported. ‘Byron and Shelley on the Character of Hamlet’ appeared in the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal eight years after Shelley’s death and six after Byron’s.

Emerging in the latter decades of the 18th century, New York periodical literature established and maintained a major relationship with the city and its people over the course of major historical, social, political, and cultural change. During this period, New York was one part of a literary triumvirate with Philadelphia and Boston in which periodical writing flourished. This periodical power soon shifted, however, to New York, with the founding of the New-York Magazine; or, Literary Repository (1790) by brothers Thomas and James Swords. The New-York Magazine preceded one of the most influential periodical publications in the history of New York writing by over a quarter of a century: the Knickerbocker (1833). New York was quickly becoming the centre of the American publishing world and the periodical was at the heart of this literary uprising. But, as this chapter argues, New York periodical literature first demonstrated its influence on New York society decades before in the final years of the 18th century.

The history of New York’s literature encompasses centuries where war, commerce, revolution, democracy, industry and immigration have shaped the city into a global metropolis. Therefore, it is a literature which not only addresses the experiences of those living within the city but the city’s relationship with the rest of the world. The city’s literature possesses a universal quality, as it serves to remind readers of the forces that shaped our lives and our identities. Written within the city’s novels, memoirs, poetry, periodicals and magazines are the myriad experiences and perspectives that chart the traumatic and triumphant processes that have formed our contemporary society. This study draws the connections between the work of authors and writers in the city and the wider world through examining movement. The prose, poetry and fiction that has emerged from the city is infused with this character that defined the modern age. This is a city built on movement; as such, it is a metropolis that evokes the changes that have made the modern world. This ensures that the narratives of this city move beyond the confines of Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island and tell a global story.

This chapter examines the critique of the production of affect advanced by a range of thinkers in the Marxist tradition, above all, Theodor Adorno, but also including Herbert Marcuse, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson. It focuses in particular on what Adorno describes as the ‘diversionary function’ of ostensibly positive affective states – especially what he calls ‘fun’, a multiply freighted word, as the chapter shows – and asks what it means to categorise such states as ‘false’. The degree to which affective states are open to misinterpretation by those undergoing them is, therefore, a central question in this chapter. Drawing on Keston Sutherland’s recent emphasis on the role of disgust in Marx’s satirical account of capitalist production, the chapter will in conclusion emphasise the affective charge of the Marxist critique of affect itself.