Assembly and its Other in German Romantic Literature and Thought

The Inexhaustible Gathering

Christopher R Clason editor Robert E Mottram editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Liverpool University Press

Published:1st Jan '23

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Assembly and its Other in German Romantic Literature and Thought cover

This collection of essays turns on a shift in Romantic studies from viewing wholeness as an absolute value to critiquing it as a limiting construction. Wholeness and its concomitant sense of harmony, rather than a natural given, is a construct that was assembled and disassembled, theorized and criticized, by diverse authors and artists in a wide variety of disciplines and socio-historical contexts, and instrumentalized for diverse purposes. The plurality of these constructions – that Goethe’s Urpflanze, for example, is not synonymous with Friedrich Schlegel’s universal progressive poetry – is but one manifestation of how “assembly” strives but fails to be absolute. The “other” of assembly referenced in the title suggests two divergent but inseparable tendencies: firstly, how a construction can take on the appearance of a natural given; and secondly, how assemblages of wholeness harbor within themselves their own principle of disarticulation. These two tendencies underlie the “inexhaustible” character of Romantic “gatherings”. As a construction passes itself off as nature, the natural fails to account for itself as a whole. The scope of this volume encompasses the establishment, mapping, and interrogation of assembly and its other in German Romanticism through interdisciplinary studies on literature, aesthetics, philosophy, drama, music, synaesthesia, mathematics, science, and exploration.

List of contributors: Beate Allert, Frederick Burwick, Alexis B. Smith, Margaret Strair, Christina Weiler, Joshua Wilner.

‘For what is under review here is an outstanding scholarly achievement—a book of great clarity in thinking and presentation, of formidable, impeccable research, a monograph displaying sovereign command of her material as well as an enthusiasm that never obscures but always illuminates what it examines.’

Christoph Bode, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität

ISBN: 9781802077261

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

224 pages