At its heart, Radical Romanticism is a book about how we might live—ethically, imaginatively, and in fuller relation—at a time when so many feel unmoored by environmental upheaval, social injustice, and the fraying of democratic life. It suggests that a subset of Romanticism, when seen from a broader angle, offers not an escape from these challenges but a set of resources for addressing them: ways of attending to the world with more attentiveness, more care, and a richer sense of connection. Rather than Romanticism as pastoral yearning and solitary reflection, the book invites readers into a different kind of Romanticism: a living conversation about beauty, justice, and the fragile work of shared life.

At its core is this claim: the aesthetic imagination is an ethical power. It shapes how we see, what we notice, whom we recognize, and what futures we can envision. Radical Romanticism treats imagination not as a retreat from reality but as a force for sharpening our attention—to injustice, to beauty, and to the ties that shape our lives. It draws our focus to the connections between inner life and collective life, between spiritual reflection and social responsibility, and between humans and the more-than-human world.

The book follows a living conversation that threads from Rousseau, the Wordsworths, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau to Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Leslie Silko. This dynamic conversation wrestles with inequality, extractivism, and estrangement from land; but it also fosters possibilities for ecological belonging, democratic renewal, and more capacious forms of care. The “radical” in radical Romanticism refers to both rootedness and critique. Radical Romanticism is rooted in people, places, and traditions that cultivate questioning, imagining alternatives, and forging just, life-sustaining relations with human and more-than-human worlds. This double meaning matters: to be radical is to return to Romantic roots while drawing from them the ethical force needed to face our political and ecological moment.

A distinctive feature of the book is its weaving together of democratic, ecological, and religious sensibilities. Democracy, religion, and ecology may seem like separate domains, but for the writers I study, they converge around a single question: how shall we live in relation? Democracy shapes how we live together politically; religion cultivates moral attentiveness; ecology reminds us we inhabit networks of life that sustain us—human and more-than-human alike. Radical Romanticism refuses to isolate these spheres, treating them instead as intertwined ways of understanding our shared world. In this sense, democracy, religion, and ecology belong together not by accident but by necessity. Feeling and thought, beauty and critique, art and justice—these are braided ways of seeing, not competing realms.

The book places well-known Romantic writers in active conversation with Black and Indigenous voices who extend, unsettle, and broaden the radical Romantic vision. Hurston, Du Bois, and Silko are central figures. They turn Romantic aspiration toward the lived realities of racism, patriarchy, colonialism, and environmental devastation—broadening the tradition’s ethical horizon and revealing its unfinished work.

Above all, the book argues that storytelling—poetic, philosophical, ceremonial—is not decorative. It teaches, alerts, repairs. It trains us to sense beyond our own borders, cultivating praxis-oriented empathy, attentiveness, and those democratic capacities without which no shared world can endure.

I hope readers approach Radical Romanticism with curiosity and a willingness to be surprised. You don’t need specialized training. You only need to be concerned about how humans might live together—and with the land—with more justice, care, and life-honoring ways. I offer the book as an invitation to attend: to the wounds of our shared world, to the beauty that nourishes resistance, and to a dark, wild hope that refuses both naïve optimism and paralyzing despair. If the book opens even a single window onto a fuller habit of attention or a more sustaining, just sense of belonging, then it has done its work.