The Romantic Imperative

The Concept of Early German Romanticism

Bibliographic Data

ID4159854
AuthorsSebastian Gardner (0000-0003-3066-5903, UCL Australia, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume46
Issue2
Pages212-213
Publication date2006-04-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe British Journal of Aesthetics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-0904 • E-ISSN: 1468-2842
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/aesthj/ayj027
OpenAlexW2028191058
LanguageEN
Citations received7

The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism. By FEDERICK C. BEISER. Harvard U.P. 2003. pp. xiii + 243. £30.95 (hbk). THE EARLY German Romantics—above all, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, the most philosophically acute members of the Jena circle, with Schelling standing slightly to one side—exercised a profound and abiding influence on modern thinking about art, but are referred to very infrequently in anglophone aesthetics. This fact has a straightforward explanation: frühromantisch thought about art, both at the level of detail and with regard to its project of cultural and spiritual regeneration centred on romantische Poesie, is dominated by a post-Kantian idealist orientation that lies far off the contemporary philosophical map. The exact relation of German Romanticism to German Idealism is a matter of dispute: some, following the prescription of Hegel, view the two as divergent and opposed paths, while others, such as Beiser, more plausibly treat them as interwoven clusters of themes that need to be viewed as belonging to a single broad development. What is clear, however, is that it is impossible to do justice to German Romanticism without entering some way into the highly complex web of debates that occupied the German intellectual world in the last decade of the eighteenth century

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · German · German idealism · Hegelianism · Literature · Romance · Romanticism · Philosophy

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