The Longing for Myth in Germany

The Longing for Myth in Germany

Author: George S. Williamson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2004-07

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 9780226899466

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Since the dawn of Romanticism, artists and intellectuals in Germany have maintained an abiding interest in the gods and myths of antiquity while calling for a new mythology suitable to the modern age. In this study, George S. Williamson examines the factors that gave rise to this distinct and profound longing for myth. In doing so, he demonstrates the entanglement of aesthetic and philosophical ambitions in Germany with some of the major religious conflicts of the nineteenth century. Through readings of key intellectuals ranging from Herder and Schelling to Wagner and Nietzsche, Williamson highlights three crucial factors in the emergence of the German engagement with myth: the tradition of Philhellenist neohumanism, a critique of contemporary aesthetic and public life as dominated by private interests, and a rejection of the Bible by many Protestant scholars as the product of a foreign, "Oriental" culture. According to Williamson, the discourse on myth in Germany remained bound up with problems of Protestant theology and confessional conflict through the nineteenth century and beyond. A compelling adventure in intellectual history, this study uncovers the foundations of Germany's fascination with myth and its enduring cultural legacy.


Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure

Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure

Author: Ayumi Mizukoshi

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-02-17

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0230285902

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This book tackles the age-old interpretative problem of 'pleasure' in Keat's poetry by placing him in the context of the liberal, leisured and luxurious culture of Hunt's circle. Challenging the standard narrative which attribute Keat's astonishing poetic development to his separation from Hunt, the author cogently argues that Keats, profoundly imbued with Hunt's bourgeois ethic and aesthetic, remained a poet of sensuous pleasure through to the end of his short career.


The German Genius

The German Genius

Author: Peter Watson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2010-09-16

Total Pages: 846

ISBN-13: 085720324X

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From the end of the Baroque age and the death of Bach in 1750 to the rise of Hitler in 1933, Germany was transformed from a poor relation among western nations into a dominant intellectual and cultural force more influential than France, Britain, Italy, Holland, and the United States. In the early decades of the 20th century, German artists, writers, philosophers, scientists, and engineers were leading their freshly-unified country to new and undreamed of heights, and by 1933, they had won more Nobel prizes than anyone else and more than the British and Americans combined. But this genius was cut down in its prime with the rise and subsequent fall of Adolf Hitler and his fascist Third Reich-a legacy of evil that has overshadowed the nation's contributions ever since. Yet how did the Germans achieve their pre-eminence beginning in the mid-18th century? In this fascinating cultural history, Peter Watson goes back through time to explore the origins of the German genius, how it flourished and shaped our lives, and, most importantly, to reveal how it continues to shape our world. As he convincingly demonstarates, while we may hold other European cultures in higher esteem, it was German thinking-from Bach to Nietzsche to Freud-that actually shaped modern America and Britain in ways that resonate today.


Schiller's Aesthetic Essays

Schiller's Aesthetic Essays

Author: Lesley Sharpe

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 9781571130587

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Friedrich Schiller, the dramatist and poet, greatly influenced the development of aesthetics through his essays. He sums up the eighteenth century while anticipating modern ideas; his notions of the naive and the sentimental, of art as play, and of beauty as semblance, have had a lasting impact on aesthetic speculation. Dr Sharpe's book is the first study devoted to tracing the attempts of successive generations of philosophers and literary critics to expound the works and deal with the problems they present. Surveying Anglo-American as well as German-language criticism, she illuminates the impact of critical and political change on their evaluation.


Freedom and Independence

Freedom and Independence

Author: Judith N. Shklar

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-06-10

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9780521143240

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This book was written to guide students of political theory who want to understand Hegel's political ideas as they appear in The Phenomenology of Mind.


The Rise of Eurocentrism

The Rise of Eurocentrism

Author: Vassilis Lambropoulos

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-10-08

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 0691201811

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In the controversy over political correctness, the canon, and the curriculum, the role of Western tradition in a post-modern world is often debated. To clarify what is at stake, Vassilis Lambropoulos traces the ideology of European culture from the Reformation, focusing on a key element of Western tradition: the act of interpretation as a distinct practice of understanding and a civil right. Championed by Protestants insisting on independent interpretation of scripture, this ideal of autonomy ushered in the era of modernity with its essentialist philosophy of universal man and his aesthetic understanding of the world. After explaining the dominance of European culture through the combined archetypes of Hebraism (reason and morality) and Hellenism (spirit and art), Lambropoulos shows how the rule of autonomy has been transformed into the aesthetic, disinterested contemplation of things in themselves. Arguing that it is time to restore the socio-political dimension to the movement of autonomy, he proposes that a genealogy of the Hebraic-Hellenic archetypes can help us evaluate more recent models--like the Afrocentric one--and redefine the controversy surrounding education, Eurocentrism, and cultural politics.


The Greek Gods in Modern Scholarship

The Greek Gods in Modern Scholarship

Author: Michael D. Konaris

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 0198737890

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The nineteenth century is a key period in the history of the interpretation of the Greek gods. The Greek Gods in Modern Scholarship examines how German and British scholars of the time drew on philology, archaeology, comparative mythology, anthropology, or sociology to advance radically different theories on the Greek gods and their origins. For some, they had been personifications of natural elements, for others, they had begun as universal gods like the Christian god, yet for others, they went back to totems or were projections of group unity. The volume discusses the views of both well-known figures like K. O. Muller (1797-1840), or Jane Harrison (1850-1928), and of forgotten, but important, scholars like F. G. Welcker (1784-1868). It explores the underlying assumptions and agendas of the rival theories in the light of their intellectual and cultural context, laying stress on how they were connected to broader contemporary debates over fundamental questions such as the origins and nature of religion, or the relation between Western culture and the 'Orient'. It also considers the impact of theories from this period on twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship on Greek religion and draws implications for the study of the Greek gods today.