From a special issue of Romantic Circles Praxis Series:
Despite its air of neutrality, “secularism” is increasingly understood to have its own interests, particularly when it comes to defining and managing the “religious.” And, thanks to its constitutive relationship to modernity, romanticism is invested in secularism, not least in those moments typically coded as “spiritual” or “religious.” Cosmopolitanism, too, bears a vexed relationship to a period typically associated with nationalism. Finally, secularism and cosmopolitanism are themselves related in surprising ways, both historically and conceptually. Do they pursue the same project? Do they diverge? How and when? And how does romantic writing figure such alignments? These are the questions motivating the three essays in this volume.
The volume includes an editor’s introduction by Colin Jager, and essays by Mark Canuel, Colin Jager, Paul Hamilton, and Bruce Robbins.