Romantic Realisms: Speculative Reconfigurations of Literature, Philosophy, and Science in German Romanticism: (27 Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780-1850)

This collection of essays builds on recent scholarship on German philosophies of nature (Naturphilosophie) to argue for a Romantic aesthetics grounded in nature and the real. It brings researchers from philosophy, aesthetics, and literary studies into dialogue around key writers like F. W. J. Schelling, Novalis, and the Schlegel brothers, and pushes back against some of the conventional formalist and psychologizing frameworks through which Romanticism has been viewed traditionally. Instead, these contributions develop a picture of Romanticism as not only having aimed to ‘represent’ things conceptually or linguistically, but as capable of acting on, existing within, and indeed participating in processes of worldmaking. The resulting image is of a Romanticism pushing at the boundaries of materialist and idealist conceptualizations of the real in equal measure. The contributions fall along two main axes, represented by two sections and an afterword. The first section addresses Schelling directly and explores the potential of his philosophy for literary and aesthetic theory. The second section brings Schelling into dialogue with literary practices around 1800 to address broader ramifications for our understanding of authors like Novalis, Hoffmann, Coleridge, and Droste-Hülshoff, also seeking to establish the contemporary viability of Schelling’s thought and its long-overlooked cultural ramifications, including in contemporary environmental thinking.

Table of Contents:
“Romantic Realisms”, Introduction Steven Lydon, Barry Murnane Schelling, Nature, Aesthetics 1. The Illusory Object of Permanence: Constructed Reality in Schelling’s Naturephilosophy Jocelyn Holland 2. The Word in the Beginning: The Emergence of Organic Space from Symbolic Language in Schelling’s Weltalter-Project Sepid (Zahra) Birashk 3. On the Immanence of Nature: Novalis Reads Schelling’s On the World-Soul Siarhei Biareishyk 4. Dynamis of Forces—On Henrik Steffens’s Schellingian Reconfiguration of Geology Benjamin Heller 5. S. T. Coleridge’s “Ideal Realism” and the Substance of Nature Peter Cheyne Nature, Literature, and Practice 6. Unconditioning Operations of the Real: Reflections on the Early-Schelling, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel Gabriel Trop 7. “Beauty must exist”: August Wilhelm Schlegel’s 1798/1801 Kunstlehre Steven Lydon 8. Floating in frozen ether. Rethinking the fantastic through Arnim, Hoffmann, and Eichendorff Barry Murnane 9. Death Writes: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Liminal Poesie Martha B. Helfer 10. “I am a Naturphilosoph of a particular direction”: Exploring the Mind-Body Nexus in Gustav Fechner’s Literary Texts and Journals Christine Lehleiter Afterword Afterword. Asemiotics and Ecocentric Reading Daniel Whistler

About the Author :
Steven Lydon is Assistant Professor in Humanities at Shanghai Tech University, and formerly Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Barry Murnane is Associate Professor in German and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford.