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Crystal B. Lake is Professor of English Literature at Wright State University, specialising in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Her recent work includes an essay on needlework verse (forthcoming in Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain), ‘Hairstory’ (in A Cultural History of Hair in the Enlightenment), ‘Antiquarianism as a Vital Historiography for the Twenty-First Century‘ (in the Wordsworth Circle) and an edited collection on Romantic Antiquarianism (with Noah Heringman, for Romantic Circles). Her exciting new monograph, Artifacts: How We Think and Write About Found Objects, was published in February by Johns Hopkins University Press. In the interview below, we discuss the book’s roots, findings and implications.

1) How did you first become interested in studying antiquarianism?

When I started my graduate studies, I was really interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representations of ruins. Reading about ruins led me to reading around in antiquarian histories. I’ve since liked to joke that if you’ll stick with an antiquarian history long enough, something weird always happens around page 284—and I, at least, was both delighted and fascinated by how antiquarian histories swerved from “drysasdust” descriptions into curious anecdotes and surprisingly heated debates.

I was probably also primed to have my interests piqued by eighteenth-century antiquaries. I grew up in a log cabin in rural West Virginia on a spot of land where my great-grandparents had also lived in a cabin—just a few miles down the road from a small town where my grandparents ran the only general store for miles and miles. Maintaining and repurposing old things were necessary efficiencies in rural Appalachia, but my father also had what you could call an antiquarian sensibility. As the area’s aging population dwindled, a lot of old things seemed to make their way into our cabin: oil lamps and pocket-watches, quilts and farm equipment, books, fossils, a spinning wheel, a pie safe, a trunk organ—all these scraps of lives once lived. Our cabin was like a museum. My dad died when I was 17 years old, and we sold the cabin along with most of the things in it to pay his medical bills. Even though I don’t have the same zeal for collecting that my father did, I still find myself compelled by old things as aesthetic objects and as byways to the past.

2) In your introduction, you write that ‘we’ve forgotten about most of the old, dirty, rusty, moldy, and broken items—the small bits and bobs whose origins or backstories were unknown and whose worth or meaning was not self-evident—that once called out to so many people’.  What do you think are the most important things we can learn by remembering these unruly artifacts?

For me, one of the biggest takeaways from my research into artifacts is that they can help us to refine our thing theories. More specifically, my book argues that old, dirty, rusty, dusty, moldy, and broken things put pressure on some of the tenets of the new materialisms. Although I’ve been convinced by the new materialists who make the case that objects have agency, I’ve been less convinced by their claims that such agency will translate into meaningful political action. I’m thinking here in particular of something like Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, which shaped a lot of my thinking as I was finishing Artifacts. Although I agree with so much that Bennett has to say in Vibrant Matter, I don’t share her optimism that attending to objects’ vibrancy will produce the kind of political changes that so many of us want and need. In the book, I conclude that artifacts are “things that do things,” to use Bruno Latour’s well-known phrase, but they don’t do what we expect or call upon them to do—which is usually to provide us with unassailable facts about the past, which is usually also a plea for objects to resolve a political-philosophical debate we’re having in the present. Instead of settling debates, artifacts provoke relays of interpretations and representations as we try to reconstruct their histories or shapes from the fragments that remain. My hope, then, is that artifacts will remind us of the responsibilities that people, rather than things, bear for creating the conditions of the past as well as the present.

3) How did you choose the four kinds of artifact you focus on in your case study chapters (coins, manuscripts, weapons and grave goods)?

Honestly, I don’t feel so much like I chose to focus on coins, manuscripts, weapons and grave goods so much as those were just the objects that I kept finding not only in antiquarian histories but also in descriptions of eighteenth-century collections and popular museums. Searching around in databases and indexes confirmed that coins, manuscripts, weapons, and grave goods preoccupied artifact-enthusiasts throughout the century. I also spent some time poking around in the Society of Antiquaries of London’s museum where I saw firsthand just how many of those four types of items had made their way into the Society’s collection.

There’s a lot of really great scholarship out there about antiquarianism as a methodology and a practice, about the relationships between antiquarianism and natural history, and also about antiquarianism relative to neoclassical connoisseurship. I was having, however, a very “Goldilocks experience” trying to find the book that would explain to me the significance of all the smaller bits and bobs that seemed to start piling up in England beginning in the seventeenth century; nothing that had been written yet seemed just right. I think a lot of scholarly books must get written that way. You end up writing the book you were hoping to read.

4) Your book concludes with an assertion about timeliness: ‘The artifactual form may be particularly responsive […] to political crises and cultural paradigm shifts in which diametrically opposed worldviews become irreconcilable: those moments when two intractable factions appear to be using the same piece of evidence for competing claims, like reading the same book but discovering different stories therein.  For these reasons, artifacts and the kinds of texts that they inspire are likely due for a comeback.’  How might thinking about eighteenth-century experiences of grappling with artifacts help us with the possibilities and the pitfalls of negotiating our own increasingly digital cultural heritage?

That’s a really great question, Matt! A lot of the digital cultural heritage we encounter erases the relationships that exist between people and things. It’s easy to forget that humans are behind every database and digital collection, making decisions and taking actions. I have in mind here not only the people who wrangle the tech but also those people who, throughout history, owned, found, preserved, or identified the texts and objects that we view on our screens. We should be careful, I think, not to get lulled by the plenitude or presentation of the digital into a false sense of security about historical facticity. Whether I’m marvelling or despairing at how much of the past seems to be available to us now online, I try to remember that there’s so much history that’s been—that’s still being—erased and contested. I hope that Artifacts might go some way in helping attune us to the politics of curation and interpretation that our digital cultural heritage often occludes.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

Right now, I’m working on two new book projects. One of these is a history of the crafts that early readers made and the consumer goods they customized: things like needleworks, toys and games, personal accessories and interior decorations that either quote from or refer directly to popular texts that were published between 1650 and 1850. The other project I’m working on is a memoir of sorts: a collection of personal essays about growing up in rural Appalachia in the 1980s, organized around key terms in literary criticism. In the meantime, I’m also working on a digital edition of Vetusta Monumenta with Noah Heringman and running The Rambling with Sarah Tindal Kareem.

Chris Washington is Assistant Professor of English at Francis Marion University. His research interests within the broader field of Romantic Studies include philosophy, ecology, biopolitics, the Anthropocene, gender studies and radical hope. In 2019, he published an essay on Shelley’s Triumph of Life as part of the Romantic Circles collection The Future of Shelley’s Triumph (edited by Joel Faflak) and co-edited (with Anne McCarthy) a collection on Romanticism and Speculative Realism (Bloomsbury Academic), to which he contributed a co-written introduction and an essay on Romantic postapocalyptic politics. In addition, he published his first monograph, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life and Hope in the Anthropocene (University of Toronto Press), which we discuss in more detail in the interview below.

1) How did you first become interested in post-apocalyptic Romantic thought?

Funnily enough, I was never much interested in the broader post-apocalyptic genre itself, or, for that matter, in how it played out in Romantic-era texts, even as I read through Shelley’s The Last Man in graduate school. I wrote a dissertation on a topic far distant from my book, sympathy in the 18^th and 19^th centuries (what a neglected topic!). Afterwards, after all the dust and smoke had cleared, on rereading the dissertation a year later, I found myself drawn toward these neglected corners of darkness scurrying around in it. Partially this renewed attention on my part was born out of a reaction to rereading some classic accounts of Romanticism that characterize it as apocalyptic (Abrams, Bloom, etc.), which of course it is in many direct and developed ways. But I also perceived some sinuous counter-pathways winding around in the period as, for instance, in the obvious texts like Byron’s “Darkness” and The Last Man. I became fully interested in this thinking, though, when I realized the texts are about more than the end of the world; they are not simply some doom-and-gloom fantasias that offer ironic consolations of depression. Which of course the genre as such is for many people. But I’ve no interest in contemplating global death as some sort of nihilistic comfort-food reading. Instead, I discovered that post-apocalyptic Romantic thought is, just as you say in the question—and apologies if this sounds tautological—a type of thinking.

In this regard, I also saw that post-apocalyptic thinking is not something that simply appears in those obvious texts by Byron and Shelley. Other texts by John Clare and even Jane Austen, say, think about life-as-it-should-be in some kind of new vision of life after the end of the world, or more accurately, the end of the world as it is for humans. If Darcy is “the last man in the world” Elizabeth might marry, the story’s sparkling conclusion hints at novel experiments in how to live after life has been co-created in a kind of self-writing and—although this point really would require more elaboration than I have space for here (read the book, I suppose)—lastness converts one into something other than what one was. That, at least, is the subject of my last chapter, which reads Pride and Prejudice as a kind of mirror-universe identical twin—or counterpart, or stolen identity—of Frankenstein. In the reading I trace in that chapter, post-apocalyptic thought is a kind of life-writing (in terms of bios=life) in that its concern is post-biopolitical since all social institutions as we know them have fallen—or soon will—and it tries to limn this new form of posthuman life. There was also, I suppose, a return to this type of thinking in contemporary fiction, poetry, television, video games, film, and music that I noticed, although I don’t take up any of that in my book.

Writing now, during the pandemic, post-apocalyptic Romantic thought seems even more obviously important than when I began the book. And that was late one night in New Orleans, when, I remember, I had finally begun to see it all pretty clearly, as if the right key had been touched on a piano and drew what was tarrying at the edge of my mental universe into sight (to mix quite a few metaphors). I sat down and sketched out the whole book in about ten minutes and that guided my work from 2014 on to final publication last year.

2) You contend provocatively in your introduction that ‘post-apocalyptic Romanticism is ultimately about happy endings’.  How did you come to develop this position?

An excellent question! I always worry, in talking about it, that I am going to misremember what I argue in my book, so let’s hope I can do the question justice.

What I do try to argue in the book is that even though we read poems like Byron’s “Darkness” and usually think of them as depressing and choking us with despair, the point of such works is—and I want to be clear that I don’t mean this as a reading-against-the-grain or some kind of counterintuitive reading—hope, to think about hope of a better life tomorrow. I try to show how hope can only appear amidst hopelessness, its most fierce enemy, and therefore, in this deconstructive way, its closest friend. Without hopelessness, hope has no reason to be—nor, in fact, can it be. As Percy Shelley writes at the end of Prometheus Unbound, humans will “suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite…till Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”

The emphasis on hope for a better future, though, should not lead us astray into thinking that these texts are allegories. They actually accurately present what is happening in the real world, at least politically speaking. They showcase the familiar, and still restraining, choice between anarchist libertarianism of the sort Hobbes wrote about as the war of all against all in the state of nature and social contract theories of the sort Rousseau wrote about where the collective good cornerstones society. The Romantics—at least in the argument I present—envision a much different politics, where nonhumans are included in any social contract and we give up on the human sovereignty that has led to our own downfall.

Post-apocalyptic Romanticism, I conclude, is therefore not rebarbative but remunerative of posthuman hope and life.  

3) You argue that ‘post-apocalyptic Romanticism drafts [a] new posthuman contract that is not only socially, but also ontologically, temporally, and politically radical’.  Do you see this draft as one that has been embellished and developed by later writers and thinkers, or principally as a manuscript that has been sadly or unfortunately neglected?

What a great question, and so elegantly put. I think many writers and creators, especially in the last ten years, have returned to this post-apocalyptic world of death, dissipation, and dilution but I don’t see, on the whole, that any of them have truly embellished in any meaningful sense on a new posthuman contract. So as far as that goes, I would say that the social contract, in the radical sense, has been sadly and unfortunately neglected. To that end, I think, beyond the fact that I am a Romanticist, this helps answer why I return to an earlier historical period to think about the Anthropocene as it affects us now. Given this sad neglect, when it comes to post-apocalyptic thinking, we remain called and bound by the Romantics even as the full radicality of their thought continues to out-perform and out-distance our own. In order to grasp this radicality, we have to paradoxically realize that post-apocalyptic Romantic thought is much more than just an originator and contributor to the end-of-the-world genre.

4) Your chapters dwell principally on the tellers of ghost stories at the Villa Diodati and on John Clare and Jane Austen.  Are there other Romantic-period figures who you didn’t have time to discuss at length in the book, but who you’d be interested in putting into dialogue with its conceptions?

Oh wow! Yes, certainly so. I would have liked to think about Anna Barbould’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head, Robert Southey’s apocalyptic epics, John Keats’s odes, Mary Wollstonecraft’s witchy magic, to name only a few. Perhaps L.E.L and her various writings on the fantastic strangeness of a kind of Twin Peaks-like fairyland otherworld glimmering through the red curtain veil to our own. Keats’s The Cap and Bells; or, the Jealousies: A Fairy Tale would have been fascinating in that regard too. Certainly, I should have written more about Coleridge, and at one time proposed in my head to do so, but I think, in the end, space did not permit the fairly deep dive a reading of his works would have required, which I’ve always found intimidating anyway. Likely, I should have done more with “Kubla Khan.” Thinking back on the book, as everyone does on their books I suppose, I wish I had written more about the authors I write about already, more on Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound for sure, as well as turning to his Laon and Cythna, and working through the heroic Satanic provocations of Byron’s The Vision of Judgment. A reading of Austen’s novels beyond Pride and Prejudice would also have been interesting and likely a smart idea.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I’m currently dallying with two different book manuscripts, although more and more one seems to be taking precedence over the other. The second one I’m calling “Quantum Romanticism: Poetry and Politics in a World without Us” and I try to think through how evocations of stars and starlight as connected to love in the work of the Shelleys, Keats, Hemans, and L.E.L create a kind poetics of love. It is the more period-specific of the two and about 50% finished.

The precedence-taking one, which I call “#OccupyRomanticism: Revolutionary Protest from Then to Now,” provides a transatlantic long Romanticism that extends to the present by tracing literature written in relation to various non-violent protest movements from the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 to Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and #MeToo. I try to show how Romanticism—or, more accurately, post-apocalyptic Romantic thinking—and contemporary thinkers sketch a communal politics for living through the climate wars of the future. The book encompasses everything from Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy, the poetry of Robert Burns, and Shelley’s The Last Man to contemporary work by authors such as Jeanette Winterson (her recent novel Frankissstein, which is a transgender rewriting of Shelley’s novel), Jackie Kay, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Sean Bonney, Natalie Diaz, and Louise Erdrich. Or so I intend it to do. It is not very done at all.  

I’m finishing an article from that book on Frederick Douglass and transgender and blackness. I’ve got another standalone piece on Jane Austen and non-binary and transgender due at the end of the summer I’ve begun reflecting on as well. Other than that, I’m working on a few book reviews of other scholarly studies of Romanticism. Most currently, an issue of Romantic Circles Pedagogies Commons that I edited is in press: “Teaching Romanticism in the Anthropocene.” It features essays by Aaron Ottinger, Brian Rejack, Elizabeth Effinger, Colin Carman, David Ruderman, and myself. My essay “Werewolf Wollstonecraft: Eco-Feminist Beast Wars” is in press with Liverpool for a great volume called Material Transgressions, edited by fellow Romantic scholars Kate Singer, Ashley Cross, and Suzanne Barnett.