This book investigates intersections between the philosophy of nature and Hellenism in British and German Romanticism, focusing primarily on five central literary/philosophical figures: Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Hölderlin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron. Near the end of the eighteenth century, poets and thinkers reinvented Greece as a site of aesthetic and ontological wholeness, a move that corresponded with a refiguring of nature as a dynamically interconnected web in which each part is linked to the living whole. This vision of a vibrant materiality that allows us to become “one with all that lives,” along with a Romantic version of Hellenism that wished to reassemble the broken fragments of an imaginary Greece as both site and symbol of this all-unity, functioned as a two-pronged response to subjective anxiety that arose in the wake of Kant and Fichte. The result is a form of resistance to an idealism that appeared to leave little room for a world of beauty, love, and nature beyond the self.

This book investigates intersections between the philosophy of nature and Hellenism in British and German Romanticism, focusing primarily on five central literary/philosophical figures: Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Hölderlin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron. Near the end of the eighteenth century, poets and thinkers reinvented Greece as a site of aesthetic and ontological wholeness, a move that corresponded with a refiguring of nature as a dynamically interconnected web in which each part is linked to the living whole. This vision of a vibrant materiality that allows us to become "one with all that lives," along with a Romantic version of Hellenism that wished to reassemble the broken fragments of an imaginary Greece as both site and symbol of this all-unity, functioned as a two-pronged response to subjective anxiety that arose in the wake of Kant and Fichte. The result is a form of resistance to an idealism that appeared to leave little room for a world of beauty, love, and nature beyond the self.

Placing Modern Greece is about literary representations of Greece in the period of Romanticism, encompassing the time in the 1820s when it became a territorial and political reality as a nation state. Constanze Guthenke claims that the imagining of and attitude towards Greece was shaped by a fascination with the material, and by the highly conceptualized tension between the ideal on the one hand, and the material on the other. Her study focuses on nature and landscape imagery as vehicles of representation, on their specific inner workings, and on their dynamic, which conditions how and whether Greece as a modern entity in the making can be represented at all. Offering readings from German and contemporaneous Greek authors, Guthenke supplies a commentary on the translation and crossings of representational models and their limits.

This book addresses the function of the classical world in the cultural imaginations of the second generation of romantic writers: Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the rest of their diverse circle. The younger romantics inherited impressions of the ancient world colored by the previous century, in which classical studies experienced a resurgence, the emerging field of comparative mythography investigated the relationship between Christianity and its predecessors, and scientific and archaeological discoveries began to shed unprecedented light on the ancient world. The Shelley circle embraced a specifically pagan ancient world of excess, joy, and ecstatic experiences that test the boundaries between self and other. Though dubbed the “Satanic School” by Robert Southey, this circle instead thought of itself as “Athenian” and frequently employed mythology and imagery from the classical world that was characterized not by philosophy and reason but by wildness, excess, and ecstatic experiences.

Recovering the forgotten discipline of Natural Philosophy for the modern world This book argues for the retrieval of 'natural philosophy', a concept that faded into comparative obscurity as individual scientific disciplines became established and institutionalized. Natural philosophy was understood in the early modern period as a way of exploring the human relationship with the natural world, encompassing what would now be seen as the distinct disciplines of the natural sciences, mathematics, music, philosophy, and theology. The first part of the work represents a critical conversation with the tradition, identifying the essential characteristics of natural philosophy, particularly its emphasis on both learning about and learning from nature. After noting the factors which led to the disintegration of natural philosophy during the nineteenth century, the second part of the work sets out the reasons why natural philosophy should be retrieved, and a creative and innovative proposal for how this might be done. This draws on Karl Popper's 'Three Worlds' and Mary Midgley's notion of using multiple maps in bringing together the many aspects of the human encounter with the natural world. Such a retrieved or 're-imagined' natural philosophy is able to encourage both human attentiveness and respectfulness towards Nature, while enfolding both the desire to understand the natural world, and the need to preserve the affective, imaginative, and aesthetic aspects of the human response to nature.

A new Forum section focuses on the impact of Digital Humanities on Goethe scholarship and on eighteenth-century German Studies, alongside articles on a diverse range of authors and topics.The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, showcasing North American and international scholarship on Goethe and other authors and aspects of the Goethezeit. Volume 27 features the yearbook''s first Forum, a discussion of the impact of Digital Humanities (DH) and "computational criticism" on Goethe scholarship and eighteenth-century German Studies more broadly. For this launch, invited contributors were askedto consider the canon in comparison to "the great unread" (Margaret Cohen): the vast expanse of uncanonized texts. The contributions evince approaches that go beyond the established binary of scholarly methods vs. data sciences; they also explore DH as a way of navigating the gendered fault lines of canon formation. Beyond the Forum, there are articles on Goethe''s self-marketing, on several of his major works, and on pivotal topics in them (orientation, der Gang, and transgression); on nascent anthropology, on Creativity Studies, and on other eighteenth-century figures (Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Phillip Moritz). A newly discovered text by August von Kotzebue, sample entries fromthe prodigious work in progress Lexikon of Philosophical Concepts, and the customary book review section round out the volume. Richard B. Apgar, Constanze Baum, Jane K. Brown, Matt Erlin, Renata Fuchs, Matthew Handelman, Katrin Henzel, Stefan Höppner, Julie Koser, James Manalad, Clark Muenzer, Maike Oergel, Andrew Piper, Mattias Pirholt, Michael Saman, Renata Schellenberg, Helmut J. Schneider, Oliver Simons, Leif Weatherby, George S. Williamson, Karin A. Wurst. Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Birgit Tautz is George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College. Book review editor Sean Franzel is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Columbia.al of his major works, and on pivotal topics in them (orientation, der Gang, and transgression); on nascent anthropology, on Creativity Studies, and on other eighteenth-century figures (Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Phillip Moritz). A newly discovered text by August von Kotzebue, sample entries fromthe prodigious work in progress Lexikon of Philosophical Concepts, and the customary book review section round out the volume. Richard B. Apgar, Constanze Baum, Jane K. Brown, Matt Erlin, Renata Fuchs, Matthew Handelman, Katrin Henzel, Stefan Höppner, Julie Koser, James Manalad, Clark Muenzer, Maike Oergel, Andrew Piper, Mattias Pirholt, Michael Saman, Renata Schellenberg, Helmut J. Schneider, Oliver Simons, Leif Weatherby, George S. Williamson, Karin A. Wurst. Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Birgit Tautz is George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College. Book review editor Sean Franzel is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Columbia.issouri-Columbia.al of his major works, and on pivotal topics in them (orientation, der Gang, and transgression); on nascent anthropology, on Creativity Studies, and on other eighteenth-century figures (Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Phillip Moritz). A newly discovered text by August von Kotzebue, sample entries fromthe prodigious work in progress Lexikon of Philosophical Concepts, and the customary book review section round out the volume. Richard B. Apgar, Constanze Baum, Jane K. Brown, Matt Erlin, Renata Fuchs, Matthew Handelman, Katrin Henzel, Stefan Höppner, Julie Koser, James Manalad, Clark Muenzer, Maike Oergel, Andrew Piper, Mattias Pirholt, Michael Saman, Renata Schellenberg, Helmut J. Schneider, Oliver Simons, Leif Weatherby, George S. Williamson, Karin A. Wurst. Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Birgit Tautz is George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College. Book review editor Sean Franzel is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Columbia.al of his major works, and on pivotal topics in them (orientation, der Gang, and transgression); on nascent anthropology, on Creativity Studies, and on other eighteenth-century figures (Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Phillip Moritz). A newly discovered text by August von Kotzebue, sample entries fromthe prodigious work in progress Lexikon of Philosophical Concepts, and the customary book review section round out the volume. Richard B. Apgar, Constanze Baum, Jane K. Brown, Matt Erlin, Renata Fuchs, Matthew Handelman, Katrin Henzel, Stefan Höppner, Julie Koser, James Manalad, Clark Muenzer, Maike Oergel, Andrew Piper, Mattias Pirholt, Michael Saman, Renata Schellenberg, Helmut J. Schneider, Oliver Simons, Leif Weatherby, George S. Williamson, Karin A. Wurst. Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Birgit Tautz is George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College. Book review editor Sean Franzel is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Columbia.issouri-Columbia.issouri-Columbia.al of his major works, and on pivotal topics in them (orientation, der Gang, and transgression); on nascent anthropology, on Creativity Studies, and on other eighteenth-century figures (Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Phillip Moritz). A newly discovered text by August von Kotzebue, sample entries fromthe prodigious work in progress Lexikon of Philosophical Concepts, and the customary book review section round out the volume. Richard B. Apgar, Constanze Baum, Jane K. Brown, Matt Erlin, Renata Fuchs, Matthew Handelman, Katrin Henzel, Stefan Höppner, Julie Koser, James Manalad, Clark Muenzer, Maike Oergel, Andrew Piper, Mattias Pirholt, Michael Saman, Renata Schellenberg, Helmut J. Schneider, Oliver Simons, Leif Weatherby, George S. Williamson, Karin A. Wurst. Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Birgit Tautz is George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College. Book review editor Sean Franzel is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Columbia.issouri-Columbia.e University of Missouri-Columbia.issouri-Columbia.

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.