Hope feels like a familiar Romantic idea. Even when Alexander Pope is circumscribing our human ambitions with the “God of all” and our “great teacher Death” in his verse epistle Essay on Man (1734), we are tempted to read his famous line, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” as a kind of temporary indulgence in Romantic optimism (Epistle 1, II, l. 19). And when Emily Dickinson names hope as “the thing with feathers” that sings through the gale, we feel familiar relief (l. 1). The central provocation of Chris Washington's Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-apocalyptic Life and Hope in the Anthropocene is that Romanticism's hope is much stranger than these practiced punchlines. Hope is neither Pope's religious promise nor Dickinson's human endurance but rather Percy Shelley's frustratingly paradoxical prophecy at the end of Prometheus Unbound: “to hope till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates”(IV, ll. 573–74). In refusing to stake the idealism of hope in Pope's human breast, Shelley imagines a non-anthropocentric hope in a frenetic scene of postapocalyptic life. Washington's reading of Shelley's apocalypse suggests that only after extinction can real hope begin.

Washington's richly suggestive book is a timely and useful polemic for all those working in Romantic studies who value the period as an age of revolution and institutional change. In this view, Mary Shelley's apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826) is not exactly a humanistic meditation on the politics of hope. Instead, Washington suggests, it exposes the “anthropocentric sovereign politics told by idiots” (79). All the opportunistic demagogues and politicians that arise from the threat of the plague are Shelley's incisively satirical answers to an “ideologically delusive, paradisiacal Romanticism” (79) that still holds onto the futile prospect of human reform in the face of extinction. In the powerful conclusion of the novel, when the last man wanders the depopulated world and discovers it nevertheless populated with nonhuman animals, Shelley transitions from the fantasies of anthropocentric politics to a model of “democracy without the ‘demos’” (99). The radical reformers of the 1790s, in a sense, had it all wrong. Washington offers us a fresh Romanticism that rejects the rights of man discourse that we frequently associate with the period. In its place is a politics not about human sovereignty or power but about a truly cosmopolitan embrace of the human and nonhuman other.

The first three chapters develop this argument by focusing on the literary products of the fateful summer in Geneva in which Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron spent their nights telling each other ghost stories about human extinction. In 1815, Mount Tambora erupted in the largest volcanic event in recorded history and turned 1816 into the notorious year without a summer. Crops failed, livestock died, and people all over the world faced what must have seemed like extinction-level famine. Trapped in the Villa Diodati, these Romantic authors pondered the nature of human life and its precarious relationship to a hostile environment. The germs of many of Washington's primary texts were born here: Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820) and The Triumph of Life (1822), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man, and Byron's “Darkness” (1816) and Cain (1821). Washington rightly locates this moment as the birth of what he calls postapocalyptic Romanticism.

Washington's readings of these canonical texts appear in a theoretical vocabulary most clearly indebted to Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2006), a foundational text in the recent strain of non-anthropocentric philosophy that has clustered around the term speculative realism. What Washington does especially well is to anticipate and address the potential critiques of how this speculative turn could infiltrate literary studies. If we turn away from the human, what happens to body theory, feminist critique, critical race studies, and disability studies (just to name a few)? In a reassuring endnote, Washington explains: “The point throughout the book has never been to privilege the nonhuman over the human or to suggest that this type of speculative critical reading is more important than feminist, critical race, post-colonial, or other such readings. Rather, from their so-called marginal positions, all such critical forms can and should be intersectionally dialogued as parallel allies” (206–7). A call to intersectionality can frequently sound like mere scholarly lip service, but the book ends with a very cogent illustration of the human and nonhuman existing as “parallel allies” in the Romantic reconfigurations of human love, specifically in John Clare's nature poetry and Jane Austen's romances.

If hope is the organizing term of the first three chapters, love is the theme of the last two. Love, for Washington, is the material intersection of the human and nonhuman. Some truly inventive close readings of Clare and Austen allow Washington to arrive at a picture of how this kind of love survives the ruins of the anthropocene. Love is not the “ever-fixed mark” (l. 5) of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116. Shakespeare's speaker pits love against change and contingency: “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds” (ll. 2–2). Instead, Washington finds love in the shifting world of “human and nonhuman ontological space-time” (145) and turns to a different sonnet, John Clare's “Sonnet: I Am,” for the poet's ideal, “radical, expansive, non-speciesist love” (149). This is the love between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813). There is no novel without the two characters’ persistent differences; love cannot flatten unlikeness into the likeness of an “ever-fixed mark.” In the end, Washington warns against an anthropocentric species love that can only be about power, strife, and extinction. Clare and Austen offer Romantic visions of a more durable and generous love.

In these postapocalyptic constructions of hope and love, Romanticism finds new resonance in our own age of climate crisis. Even amidst the so-called sixth extinction, Washington makes the case that there is ample space and time to defamiliarize “the thing with feathers” and the “ever-fixed mark.” Washington's call for a new social contract that thinks beyond narrow species categories is a welcome reminder that this cohort of two-hundred-year-old Romantic reformers is still changing the world.