During the Romantic era, many in Germany believed music to be the highest art form, representing the quintessence of Romanticism and able to express what could not be expressed in words. This book studies the work of composers during this period and examines the cross-over between music and literature.
Using an illuminating method that challenges the popular notion of Romanticism as aesthetic escapism, Theodore Ziolkowski explores five institutions--mining, law, madhouses, universities, and museums--that provide the socio-historical context for German Romantic culture. He shows how German writers and thinkers helped to shape these five institutions, all of which assumed their modern form during the Romantic period, and how these social structures in turn contributed to major literary works through image, plot, character, and theme. "Ziolkowski cannot fail to impress the reader with a breadth of erudition that reveals fascinating intersections in the life and works of an artist.... He conveys the sense of energy and idealism that fueled Schiller and Goethe, Fichte and Hegel, Hoffmann and Novalis...."--Emily Grosholz, The Hudson Review "[This book] should be put in the hands of every student who is seriously interested in the subject, and I cannot imagine a scholar in the field who will not learn from it and be delighted with it."--Hans Eichner, Journal of English and Germanic Philology "Ziolkowski is among those who go beyond lip-service to the historical and are able to show concretely the ways in which generic and thematic intentions are inextricably enmeshed with local and specific institutional circumstances."--Virgil Nemoianu, MLN
Often portrayed as a movement of poets lost in swells of passion, early German Romanticism has been generally overlooked by scholars in favor of the great system-builders of the post-Kantian period, Schelling and Hegel. In the twelve lectures collected here, Manfred Frank redresses this oversight, offering an in-depth exploration of the philosophical contributions and contemporary relevance of early German Romanticism. Arguing that the early German Romantics initiated an original movement away from idealism, Frank brings the leading figures of the movement, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), into concert with contemporary philosophical developments, and explores the role that Friedrich Hölderlin and other members of the Homburg Circle had upon the development of early German Romantic philosophy.
This study restores and enhances the philosophical aspect of early German Romanticism, offering an understanding of the movement's origins, development, aims and accomplishments.
Crosses disciplinary boundaries to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience and the interplay of text and image in Romantic epistemology. The work of the groundbreaking writers and artists of German Romanticism -- including the writers Tieck, Brentano, and Eichendorff and the artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge -- followed from the philosophical arguments of the German Idealists, who placed emphasis on exploring the subjective space of the imagination. The Romantic perspective was a form of engagement with Idealist discourses, especially Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Fichte's Science of Knowledge. Through an aggressive, speculative reading of Kant, the Romantics abandoned the binary distinction between the palpable outer world and the ungraspable space of the mind's eye and were therefore compelled to develop new terms for understanding the distinction between "internal" and "external." In this light, Brad Prager urges a reassessment of some of Romanticism's major oppositional tropes, contending that binaries such as "self and other," "symbol and allegory," and "light and dark," should be understood as alternatives to Lessing's distinction between interior and exterior worlds. Prager thus crosses the boundaries between philosophy, literature, and art history to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience, examining the interplay of text and image in the formulation of Romantic epistemology. Brad Prager is Associate Professor of Germanat the University of Missouri, Columbia.
Friedrich Schleiermacher's groundbreaking work in theology and philosophy was forged in the cultural ferment of Berlin at the convergence of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The three sections of this book include illuminating sketches of Schleiermacher's relationship to contemporaries (Mendelssohn, Hegel and Kierkegaard), his work as public theologian (dialogue on Jewish emancipation, founding the University of Berlin) as well as the formation and impact of his two most famous books, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers and The Christian Faith. Richard Crouter examines Schleiermacher's stance regarding the status of doctrine, Church and political authority, and the place of theology among the academic disciplines. Dedicated to the Protestant Church in the line of Calvin, Schleiermacher was equally a man of the university who brought the highest standards of rationality, linguistic sensitivity and a sense of history to bear upon religion.
Over 130 poems by 23 poets, including Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin, Tieck, Heine, Nietzsche, many others. New literal English translations on facing pages. Introduction.