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 roomfor a world of beauty, love, and nature beyond the self.
Table of Content
1. Introduction: Romantic Hellenism, the Philosophy of Nature, and Subjective Anxiety.- 2. Intellectual Intuition: With Hölderlin, “Lost in the Wide Blue’.- 3. The Philosophy of Nature: Goethe, Schelling, and the World Soul.- 4. Aesthetic/Erotic Intuition: Hölderlin, Shelley, and the Islands of the Archipelago.- 5. Coda: with Byron on Acrocorinth.
About the author
William S. Davis is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and German at Colorado College, USA.
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