This project examines the afterlives of British Romanticism in the American and British New Age movements that emerged in the 1970s and ‘80s, in relation to Romantic-era and twentieth-century challenges to received ideas about materialism and agency. It explores the ways that Romantic literature and art—especially, that of William Blake—took on a new life in and through counter cultural and New Age literature and culture. Specifically, I argue that the British and American New Age movements represent a reinvention of Romanticism with a distinctly Blakean flavor. Long cast as the odd man out of Romanticism, Blake stands as the exemplary figure of what I call “New Age Romanticism,” an essentially ecological worldview oriented toward revaluing what Adorno called the “primacy of the object in subjective experience,” and recovering excluded forms of knowledge and practice. Romanticism emerges here not, as we have often thought, as a historical movement concerned primarily with individual subjectivity or historical difference, but as a repeatable set of practices, attitudes, and cultural artifacts for channeling alternative, even alien, modes of being in the service of imagining otherwise unimaginable futures.

This comparison between the Romantic period and late twentieth century also recognizes enduring anxieties around certain issues with Romantic-era roots—secularization; the ecological crisis; the rise of consumerism, urbanism, and new technologies; and shifting conceptions of subjectivity, politics, and community—that challenge the hierarchies and chronologies of Romanticism and our theories of modernity. In examining how the New Age resituated Blake and Romanticism, I explore the surprising ways that that the ideas associated with New Age Romanticism overlap with and diverge from the insights of Romanticist and Blake studies, ecological theory and new materialisms, aesthetics, and critical interest in spectrality, hauntology, and mediumship. In its demonstration of the ways in which Romantic texts, ideas, and styles became effective material and historical forces that continue to animate our present-day social and critical debates, this project not only recasts Blake in particular as an ecological and socially engaged figure, but also demonstrates the extent to which we have never quite left the Romantic period.