Mark S. Cladis's "Radical Romanticism"

Mark S. Cladis is the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where he is a faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies, the Center for Environmental Humanities, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination, with the following results:

Summary of page 99: Rousseau, in his epistolary novel Julie, revolutionized Western aesthetic and religious sensibilities. Once considered barbarous and godforsaken, the Alpine landscape became for him a site of beauty, revelation, and moral awakening. His heroine Julie embodies a “worldly religion”--a lively faith bound to the Earth and to the suffering and goodness of human and more-than-human life. Her husband Wolmar, by contrast, stands for a cold, detached rationalism, a moral reasoning cut off from the vitality of the world. Rousseau’s transformation of the “ugly” into the divine helped shape Romanticism’s spiritual and aesthetic imagination--from Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft to Emerson and Thoreau.

The Page 99 Test: Page 99 offers a remarkably good window into Radical Romanticism. It captures the book’s central claim that Romanticism is not a flight from the world but a radical reorientation toward it--a spiritual and political renewal grounded in earthly relations. Rousseau’s inversion of ugliness and beauty, alienation and belonging, prefigures the democratic and ecological visions that the book traces across later writers and movements.

Still, the page shows only one part of the book’s landscape. Other sections expand beyond Rousseau’s Europe to include feminist, Black, and Indigenous reimaginings of the sacred, the political, and the ecological--traditions that widen the very meaning of Romanticism, ecology, and of democracy. Rousseau’s Alps are an early instance of what I call “radical Romanticism”: a mode of world-making that treats care, vulnerability, and interdependence as spiritual practices. His mountains mark the moment when what had been dismissed as barren and broken becomes a place of belonging and revelation, when the world, once shut out, is allowed to speak. Other sections, however, shift from mountains to more precarious terrains--sites of slavery, gendered oppression, and dispossession--but the same pulse endures: the conviction that beauty and justice begin in how we inhabit the Earth.

If Rousseau teaches readers to look again at what they had dismissed as barren, later writers push the question harder: What does beauty mean in a world structured by inequality? Where does revelation occur when land itself has been stolen, polluted, or enclosed? Those voices--feminist, Black, and Indigenous--stretch the Romantic impulse toward care and relation into new ethical registers. They ask not only how the world speaks, but how we learn to listen when its speech is fractured by violence and loss. In that listening, we stand to learn how care, land, and emancipation are braided, and how the sacred becomes legible in places marked by dispossession as much as by beauty.

Learn more about Radical Romanticism at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue