German Romantic Criticism

by A. Leslie Willson

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

293 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1982

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting, rather eclectic, collection of essays from German Romantics. Jean Paul, Kleist, and Görres' essays stood out, Novalis and Hölderlin were cryptic, and Humboldt was a bore. Was useful to see all of the different ways that people were interpreting the Romantic/Classical distinction - despite Romanticism being more "modern", there's a lot of Greek-worship going on, as if Greek poetry was still ur-poetry and the poetry par excellence. It sometimes seemed like Romanticism is more of a critique of the Golden, "Augustan" Ages in English, French, and German Literature, a rebellion against Romanism, than against classical models in general. There's a lot of language-politics going on, folks trying to keep the German language "pure" when they translate French into German, folks dealing with the many dialects of German and how to synthesize them into a national literature.

I was a bit frustrated by the lack of critical apparatus, eg. didn't list the dates or editions of the German editions the texts were translated from, no index, no footnotes. Hölderlin's essay in particular would have benefitted from a contextualization in terms of Fichte's philosophy, as well as glosses giving the original German for some key words.