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<address><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ron/2006-n41-42-ron1276/013152ar/">https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ron/2006-n41-42-ron1276/013152ar/</a><br>
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<p class="main-header__meta"><span class="surtitre">I. The
Rossetti Archive, the Blake Archive, and Romantic Circles
as Case Studies: The Transformation and Future of Romantic
Scholarship</span></p>
<h1 class="doc-head__title"><span class="titre">Digital
Romanticism in the Age of Neo-Luddism: the Romantic
Circles Experiment</span></h1>
<ul class="grauteur doc-head__authors">
<li class="auteur doc-head__author"><span class="nompers">Steven
E. Jones</span></li>
</ul>
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<li class="auteur-affiliation">
<p><strong>Steven E. Jones</strong><br>
Loyola University Chicago</p>
</li>
</ul>
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<p>Online publication: July 4, 2006</p>
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<h3>Abstract</h3>
Abstract
<p class="alinea">The Romantic Circles Website, along with a
number of other major projects in digital Romanticism, came
online around 1995, a historical moment that also saw the
emergence of neo-Luddism, in part as a reaction to the
techno-hype of the Internet boom. At the time. neo-Luddites
often claimed as a precedent the original historical Luddism of
1811-16, but they usually also Romanticized that collective
labor subculture to fit their own late-twentieth-century ideas
of “technology.” This essay looks back at the interlinked
assumptions in the air around 1995–neo-Luddite and Romantic–as
the context out of which Romantic Circles defined its own
engaged experiment in technology. Iw ill cite specific examples
of digital technologies from our first year (two editions about
technology, including the technology of texts), and one from our
most recent year (an experiment in podcasting), in order to
explain how we at Romantic Circles have attempted to work at the
crossroads of Romanticism and technology, while stubbornly
refusing to play the role of "natural Luddites,"</p>
</section>
<h2 class="sr-only">Article body</h2>
<blockquote class="epigraphe ">
<p class="alinea">Another expression of a Luddistic kind, also
contemporary with the Luddites, was Romanticism, beginning with
Blake and Wordsworth and Byron particularly, who like the
machine breakers were repulsed by the Satanic mills and
getting-and-spending of the present and like them were mindful
of the ruined paradise of the past.</p>
<cite class="source">—- Kirkpatrick Sale (1995)</cite>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="epigraphe ">
<p class="alinea">Intellectuals and romantics like the poets
Blake, Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth picked up that
anti-technology theme, but identified with its other side. In
the “dark Satanic mills” of industry, they saw the human spirit
being stifled . . . .</p>
<cite class="source">—- William Safire (1998)</cite>
</blockquote>
<div class="para" id="pa1">
<p class="alinea">The Romantic Circles Website, along with a
number of other major projects in digital Romanticism, came
online around 1995, at the same historical moment when
neo-Luddism emerged as a cultural phenomenon. This essay looks
back at the interlinked assumptions in the air around
1995–neo-Luddite and Romantic–as the context out of which
Romantic Circles defined its own engaged experiment in
technology. I will cite specific examples of digital
technologies from our first year (two editions about technology,
including the technology of texts), and one from our most recent
year (an experiment in podcasting), in order to explain how we
at Romantic Circles have attempted to work at the crossroads of
Romanticism and technology, while stubbornly refusing to play
the role of what C. P. Snow called "natural Luddites" (22).</p>
</div>
<div class="para" id="pa2">
<p class="alinea">By now the association of Romanticism with the
Luddites and, in turn, with the Luddites’ presumed
anti-technology philosophy is widespread in popular culture. It
also persists among some literary academics. My opening
quotations above could have been multiplied indefinitely, but
these two, from the most influential neo-Luddite writer of the
1990s and from a popular newspaper columnist, together exemplify
the moment around 1995 when technology “futures” (in every sense
of the word) were at a peak, and when, in reaction, a
neo-Luddite “movement” briefly arose and was reported on by the
media.<a
href="https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ron/2006-n41-42-ron1276/013152ar/#no1"
id="re1no1" class="norenvoi" title="The article often cited by
later neo-Luddites as an origin-text is Chellis Glendenning’s
1990 “Towards a Neo-Luddite Manifesto.” For a historical look
at the reception of the idea of[…]">[1]</a> What often went
unnoticed at the time was how much this conflict between
technology and its discontents depended on established clichés
about Romanticism. Their politics may be very different but
Kirkpatrick Sale and William Safire share the fundamental
literary-historical assumption that the Romantics were “natural
Luddites.” Romanticism, full of mindfulness, nostalgia and the
transcendence of “the human spirit,” is on one side of the
assumed opposition; the Satanic Mills of industry, consumerism,
and technology are on the other.</p>
<p class="alinea"><br>
</p>
<p class="alinea">[...]<br>
</p>
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