Women and Writing in the Works of Novalis
Transformation beyond Measure?
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Published:3rd Dec '07
Should be back in stock very soon
A balanced study of gender in Novalis as expressed in his literary, political, and scientific writings and in his letters. The great poet and polymath Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis, was long seen as representing a particular brand of German Romanticism, embodying a predilection for the mystical and the irrational and a longing for death.Yet 20th-century scholars debunked that myth and arrived at a view of the poet as one who produced a unified, precociously modern body of work in which human systems of individual and collective being as well as knowledge and itsdisciplines exist as fictional structures, as represented possibility rather than fixed truth. As such, all being and knowledge could and should be subjected to the ironic play of Romantic poetry, which sought to renew the individual and the world it inhabited. Hardenberg's work has come in for particular criticism for idealizing women, thus denying the living, expressive female subject; the conservative social roles it ascribes to women are also cited. Although more recent critics have discerned an empowered female subject in Novalis, this is the first balanced, book-length study of gender in Novalis in English. It concludes that Hardenberg's Romantic writing began to be successful in reinventing the "fiction" of female identity, and goes further to reveal his extensive interaction with women as intellectual equals. James R. Hodkinson is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Warwick, UK.
Well written, carefully researched and documented, and convincingly argued . . . The author's knowledge of Novalis is comprehensive. * CHOICE *
Hodkinson subscribes on the whole to an approach to Novalis studies popular with poststructuralists, but he does not subsume the author under the theory. . His focus is more on close readings than on developing a new theory of a Romantic theory of writing. But he does explain what (at least one sort of ) 'Romantic' writing actually is, and how Novalis's philosophy and poesy fit into that context. * MONATSHEFTE *
Hodkinson attempts to bring the problem of women in Novalis into relation to the problem of writing. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *
ISBN: 9781571133762
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 1g
286 pages