Joseph Albernaz’s masterful study of Romantic writers and the aesthetic and political dimensions of Romanticism, particularly as related to the commons and their enclosure, is one of the most recent literary monographs to be indexed at Southwest Humanities. Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community (Stanford University Press, 2024) “argues that Romantic writers articulate a vital conception of ‘groundless community,’ while following this idea through its aesthetic, ecological, political, and philosophical registers into the present.” Presenting careful studies of authors such as the Wordsworths, John Clare, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Robert Wedderburn, Albernaz (Columbia University) explores the relations between poetics, ethics, and the violent appropriation/enclosure of the commons in order to shed new light on the notion of “groundless community.” “Unearthing Romanticism’s intersections with the history of communism and the general strike, Albernaz also demonstrates how Romantic literature’s communal imagination reverberates through later theories of community in Bataille, Derrida, Nancy, Moten, and others.” For more information about this excellent book, please take a look at the publisher’s website here.