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
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
‘This edited volume of eight contributions and one introduction on conceptions of assembly in German Romanticism is useful both for those with expertise in Romanticism as well as for non-specialists with theoretical interests in either Romantic systems or the concept of assembly more generally. Many seminal concepts of Romanticism are lent new life by the representation of different methodological approaches to Romantic structure.’
David Takamura, Oxford German Studies
ISBN: 9781802077261
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
224 pages