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This interdisciplinary study examines the impact of the emerging awareness of historicity on the concepts of modernity, identity, and culture as they developed in German thought around 1800. It shows how this awareness determined the German notion of the priority of cultural identity. Key texts from Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism, German Romanticism and German Idealism, including Goethe's Faust I and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, are contextualised in relation to post-Enlightenment debates on historicity and modernity. The study traces the modification of the Enlightenment concepts of perfectibility and universal ideals to accommodate the new notion of temporal particularity and impermanence. This is achieved by embedding these once static concepts in a historical process that is powered by a self-prompting internal dialectic. Through synthetic absorption within the historical succession the dialectical process allows for the continuity of values, while leaving room for discontinuity and difference by relying on oppositional successions. The study reveals close connections between the intellectual concerns, the literary ambitions, and the endeavours to construct a modern German identity during this period, which suggests a far greater intellectual coherence of the Goethezeit regarding intellectual challenges and objectives than has been previously assumed.

One of the most contentious questions in contemporary literary studies is whether there can ever be a science of literature that can lay claim to objectivity and universality, for example by concentrating on philological criticism, by appealing to cognitive science, or by exposing the underlying media of literary communication. The present collection of essays seeks to open up this discussion by posing the question's historical and systematic double: has there been a science of literature, i.e. a mode of presentation and practice of reference in science that owes its coherence to the discourse of literature? Detailed analyses of scientific, literary and philosophical texts show that from the late 18th to the late 19th century science and literature were bound to one another through an intricate web of mutual dependence and distinct yet incalculable difference. The Science of Literature suggests that this legacy continues to shape the relation between literary and scientific discourses inside and outside of academia.

This study analyzes how the imagination of the epic genre as legitimately legitimating community also unleashes an ambivalence between telling coherent ? and hence legitimating ? stories of political community and narrating open-ended stories of contingency that might de-legitimate political power. Manifest in eighteenth-century poetics above all in the disjunction between programmatic definitions of the epic and actual experiments with the genre, this ambivalence can also arise within a single epic over the course of its narrative. The present study thus traces how particular eighteenth-century epics explore an originary incompleteness of political power and its narrative legitimations. The first chapter sketches an overview of how eighteenth-century writers construct an imaginary epic genre that is assigned the task of performing the cultural work of legitimating political communities by narrating their allegedly unifying origins and borders. The subsequent chapters, however, explore how the practice of epic storytelling in works by Klopstock, Goethe, Wieland, and, in an epilogue, Brentano enact the disruptive potential of poetic language and narrative to question the legitimations of imaginary political origins and unities.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, European intellectuals shifted from admiring China as a utopian place of wonder to despising it as a backwards and despotic state. That transformation had little to do with changes in China itself, and everything to do with Enlightenment conceptions of political identity and Europe’s own burgeoning global power. China in the German Enlightenment considers the place of German philosophy, particularly the work of Leibniz, Goethe, Herder, and Hegel, in this development. Beginning with the first English translation of Walter Demel’s classic essay “How the Chinese Became Yellow,” the collection’s essays examine the connections between eighteenth-century philosophy, German Orientalism, and the origins of modern race theory.

Written at the crossroads of aesthetics and politics, Reproducing Enlightenment: Paradoxes of the Body Politic interrogates the abstraction of the bearer of rights in Enlightenment thought by exploring contradictions between reproductive labor and political representation in the ideal of democratic citizenship. Drawing parallels between new definitions of biological form in Kant's Critique of Judgment and his popular writings on Enlightenment, Reese's study reveals connections between naturalist inquiry and the political category of self-evidence around the turn of the 19th century. Pursuing this connection into Weimar-Classical era aesthetics, Reese's scholarship sets the backdrop against which she proposes to read the formal literary innovations of Mary Shelley and Heinrich von Kleist. The careful comparison of textual compositions by Shelley and Kleist shows how these two authors refuse organicist metaphor and excavate the paradoxes of Enlightenment attempts to theorize the equality of a disembodied subject. Reproducing Enlightenment traces two anti-classical poetics that arc beyond the concept of juridical and biological self-evidence to touch the dialectics and dilemmas of recognition at the foundation of social being.

The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that showcase significant scholarly work at the various intersections that currently motivate interdisciplinary inquiry in German cultural studies. Topics span all periods of German and German-speaking lands and cultures from the local to the global, with a special focus on demonstrating how various disciplines - history, musicology, art history, anthropology, religious studies, media studies, political theory, literary and cultural studies, among others - and new theoretical and methodological paradigms work across disciplinary boundaries to create knowledge and add to critical understanding in German studies broadly. All works are in English. Three to four new titles will be published annually.

Since Germany became a colonial power relatively late, postcolonial theorists and histories of colonialism have thus far paid little attention to it. Uncovering Germany's colonial legacy and imagination, Susanne Zantop reveals the significance of colonial fantasies—a kind of colonialism without colonies—in the formation of German national identity. Through readings of historical, anthropological, literary, and popular texts, Zantop explores imaginary colonial encounters of \"Germans\" with \"natives\" in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literature, and shows how these colonial fantasies acted as a rehearsal for actual colonial ventures in Africa, South America, and the Pacific. From as early as the sixteenth century, Germans preoccupied themselves with an imaginary drive for colonial conquest and possession that eventually grew into a collective obsession. Zantop illustrates the gendered character of Germany's colonial imagination through critical readings of popular novels, plays, and travel literature that imagine sexual conquest and surrender in colonial territory—or love and blissful domestic relations between colonizer and colonized. She looks at scientific articles, philosophical essays, and political pamphlets that helped create a racist colonial discourse and demonstrates that from its earliest manifestations, the German colonial imagination contained ideas about a specifically German national identity, different from, if not superior to, most others.

This book argues that Nietzsche's polemics against the 19th-century reception of Goethe and Schiller should not obscure his own more positive evaluation of Weimar classicism, as has generally been the case. The authors uncover the continuing influence of Weimar classicism at the very heart of Nietzsche's aesthetic theory, which in turn became the cornerstone of his epistemological and moral concerns. The book takes as its starting point the view that 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' has a single, coherent message that it identifies with what Goethe called \"the gospel of beauty.\" A hitherto unappreciated unity of plot, style, and argument is thus revealed in both 'Zarathustra' and Nietzsche's philosophical 'oeuvre' as a whole, showing how he participates in a \"perennial aesthetic.\" In this connection Nietzsche's statement in 'The Gay Science' is revealing: \"I want to learn more and more to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful ? then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.\" The book provides an overview of related scholarly literature; discusses Nietzsche's aesthetic theory in 'The Birth of Tragedy'; recounts the composition of 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' and offers an interpretation of its \"aesthetic gospel\"; a concluding chapter explores historical continuities in aesthetic theory. By demonstrating the constitutive function of the aesthetics of Weimar classicism in his philosophy, this book opens up a fresh and original perspective on Nietzsche. Paul Bishop is Professor of German, and R. H. Stephenson is William Jacks Professor of German Language and Literature, both at the University of Glasgow.

The eight chapters in Nationalism before the Nation State: Literary Constructions of Inclusion, Exclusion, and Self-Definition (1756-1871) explore how the German nation was imagined from the beginning of the Seven Year's War to the nation's political foundation in 1871.