The Romantic poet's intense yearning to share thoughts and feelings
often finds expression in a style that thwarts a connection with
readers. Yohei Igarashi addresses this paradox by reimagining Romantic
poetry as a response to the beginnings of the information age. Data
collection, rampant connectivity, and efficient communication became
powerful social norms during this period. The Connected Condition
argues that poets responded to these developments by probing the
underlying fantasy: the perfect transfer of thoughts, feelings, and
information, along with media that might make such communication
possible.
This book radically reframes major poets and canonical poems. Igarashi
considers Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a stenographer, William Wordsworth
as a bureaucrat, Percy Shelley amid social networks, and John Keats in
relation to telegraphy, revealing a shared attraction and skepticism
toward the dream of communication. Bringing to bear a singular
combination of media studies, the history of communication, sociology,
rhetoric, and literary history, The Connected Condition proposes new
accounts of literary difficulty and Romanticism. Above all, this book
shows that the Romantic poets have much to teach us about living with
the connected condition and the fortunes of literature in it.