Overview
Engages with Romantic Hellenism in Germany and England
Focuses on five crucial figures who straddle the domains of philosophy and poetry
Argues that the study of Romanticism benefits from an understanding of Kantian ideas
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Table of contents (5 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book investigates intersections between the philosophy of nature and Hellenism in British and German Romanticism, focusing primarily on five central literary/philosophical figures: Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Hölderlin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron. Near the end of the eighteenth century, poets and thinkers reinvented Greece as a site of aesthetic and ontological wholeness, a move that corresponded with a refiguring of nature as a dynamically interconnected web in which each part is linked to the living whole. This vision of a vibrant materiality that allows us to become “one with all that lives,” along with a Romantic version of Hellenism that wished to reassemble the broken fragments of an imaginary Greece as both site and symbol of this all-unity, functioned as a two-pronged response to subjective anxiety that arose in the wake of Kant and Fichte. The result is a form of resistance to an idealism that appeared to leave little room for a world of beauty, love, and nature beyond the self.
Reviews
“Romanticism, Hellenism, and the Philosophy of Nature nonetheless provides interesting analyses that help reassess these divergent paths. The possibility of such a reassessment is found in the structure of Davis’s book, which is framed by an interesting idea that illuminates both post post-Kantian philosophy and logical empiricism.” (Adam Tamas Tuboly, Comparative and Continental Philosophy, April 01, 2019)
“This is an acute and lucid study of a resonant set of concerns informing all kinds of Romantic literature and thinking. A good many poets and philosophers were beguiled by and took their bearings from ancient Greek culture, infusing Romantic texts in Britain and Germany with theories, motifs, and organizing principles, a culture that helped the Romantics think especially about nature. Davis elucidates all this through his inspired focus on the more or less anxious insistence on oneness, from the precarious unity of the individual self, after Kant, to nothing less than the totality of the cosmos. With the gift of this study, we are in a far better position to understand the rhetoric and force of so many crucial Romantic texts and the thinking behind them.” (Ian Balfour, York University, Toronto, Canada)Authors and Affiliations
About the author
William S. Davis is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and German at Colorado College, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Romanticism, Hellenism, and the Philosophy of Nature
Authors: William S. Davis
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91292-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-91291-2Published: 09 July 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-08214-7Published: 22 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-91292-9Published: 20 June 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 156
Topics: History of Philosophy, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Intellectual Studies, Literary History