Romanticism, Hellenism, and the Philosophy of Nature

by William S. Davis

Overview

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 roomfor a world of beauty, love, and nature beyond the self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319912929
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	06/20/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	485 KB

About the Author

William S. Davis is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and German at Colorado College, USA.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Romantic Hellenism, the Philosophy of Nature, and Subjective Anxiety.- 2. Intellectual Intuition: With Hölderlin, “Lost in the Wide Blue".- 3. The Philosophy of Nature: Goethe, Schelling, and the World Soul.- 4. Aesthetic/Erotic Intuition: Hölderlin, Shelley,  and the Islands of the Archipelago.- 5. Coda: with Byron on Acrocorinth.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“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)

Editorial 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)

From the Publisher