This Handbook provides a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the philosophical dimensions of German Romanticism, a movement that challenged traditional borders between philosophy, poetry, and science. With contributions from leading international scholars, the collection places the movement in its historical context by both exploring its links to German Idealism and by examining contemporary, related developments in aesthetics and scientific research. A substantial concluding section of the Handbook examines the enduring legacy of German romantic philosophy.
Key Features:
- Highlights the contributions of German romantic philosophy to literary criticism, irony, cinema, religion, and biology.
- Emphasises the important role that women played in the movement’s formation.
- Reveals the ways in which German romantic philosophy impacted developments in modernism, existentialism and critical theory in the twentieth century.
- Interdisciplinary in approach with contributions from philosophers, Germanists, historians and literary scholars.
Providing both broad perspectives and new insights, this Handbook is essential reading for scholars undertaking new research on German romantic philosophy as well as for advanced students requiring a thorough understanding of the subject.
Table of Contents
1. The Meaning of German Romanticism for the Philosopher by Elizabeth Millán Brusslan
Part I Historical Context
2. The Poem of the Understanding: Kant, Novalis, and Early German Romantic Philosophy by Jane Kneller
3. F.H. Jacobi on Reason and Nihilism in Romanticism by Paolo Livieri
4. Spinoza and Romanticism by Michael Mack
5. Religion and Early German Romanticism by Jacqueline Mariña
6. Femininity and the Salon by Anne Pollok
7. Fichte’s Subject and Its Romantic Transformations by Andrew J. Mitchell
8. Friedrich Schiller and the Aestheticization of Ethics by Marina F. Bykova
9. Johann Gottfried Herder: Misunderstood Romantic? by Johannes Schmidt
10. Hermeneutics and Orientation: Retracing the ‘Sciences of the Spirit’ (Geisteswissenschaften) in the Education-Related Writings of Fichte, Schleiermacher and Novalis by John G. Moore
Part II Aesthetics and Romanticism
11. Philosophical Critique and Literary Criticism in German Romanticism by J. Colin McQuillan
12. Romantic Irony by Karolin Mirzakhan
13. The Role of the Fragment in German Romantic Philosophy and Nietzsche by Guy Elgat
14. Early German Romanticism and Literature: Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis and the New Philosophical Importance of the Novel by Allen Speight
15. The Cinematic Afterlife of German Romanticism by Laurie Johnson
Part III Romanticism and the Sciences
16. Romantic Biology: Carl Gustav Carus at the Edge of the Modern by Robert J. Richards
17. Goethe’s Philosophy of Nature by Tim Mehigan and Peter Banki
18. Romantic Acts of Generation by Jocelyn Holland
19. Arts of Unconditioning: On Romantic Science and Poetry by Gabriel Trop
20. Romantic Conceptions of Life by Leif Weatherby
Part IV Legacy
21. Women, Women Writers, and Early German Romanticism by Anna Ezekiel
22. Romantic Philosophy as Anthropology by Carl Niekerk
23. From the Pantheism Panic to Modern Anxiety: Friedrich Schelling’s Invention of the Philosophy of “Angst” by Jeffrey S. Librett
24. Romanticism and Pessimism by Frederick Beiser
25. Romanticism as Modernism: Richard Wagner’s “Artwork of the Future” by Günter Zöller
26. Between Appropriation and Transmission: The Romantic Thread in Heidegger’s Existential Notion of Understanding by Pol Vandevelde
27. Sensibility, Reflection, and Play: Early German Romanticism and Its Legacy in Contemporary Continental Philosophy by Elaine P. Miller
28. ‘The Concept of Critique’: Between Early German Romanticism and Early Critical Theory by Nathan Ross
29. Romanticism, Anarchism, and Critical Theory by Fred Rush
30. Conclusion: Romantic Currents of Thought: An Open Ending by Elizabeth Millán Brusslan
Simon Gros 
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