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Reviewed by:
  • The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism
  • Dennis F. Mahoney
Nicholas Saul, ed., The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xx + 335 pp., 2 illustrations.

German romanticism, with its penchant for crossing boundaries and its ever-shifting groupings of artists and intellectuals, is a phenomenon that calls for interdisciplinary, collaborative scholarship. Nicholas Saul, who has done pathbreaking work as scholar and editor on what he has called the “Aesthetic Humanism” of the period from 1790 to 1830, has here assembled a distinguished team of scholars from British, Irish, German, and American universities to take a fresh look at German romanticism.

After Azade Seyhan’s introduction to the historical, philosophical, and literary origins and essential features of early romanticism, Ricarda Schmidt traces differing notions of human fulfillment in love and art from early to late romanticism, while also taking note of the triadic concept of historical development that distinguishes the romantic writers from their predecessors and successors. Then follow concise, informative chapters on the narrative, lyric, and dramatic productions of German romanticism, written respectively by Anthony Phelan, Charlie Louth, and Roger Paulin, which are complemented by John McCarthy’s ensuing reflections on the forms and objectives of romantic criticism as a “a fourth generic category” (114). Both in these chapters and throughout the volume as a whole, it is encouraging to encounter more than just the “usual suspects” of literary histories of German romanticism. McCarthy discusses, for example not only the Schlegels and Hardenberg/Novalis, but also Görres and Adam Müller, while Louth includes treatments of Hölderlin and Günderode in his interpretations of the romantic lyric. Kleist’s works are treated in the chapters on romantic prose and drama; likewise, Zacharias Werner’s works appear not only in this latter chapter, but also in Saul’s essay “Love, Death and Liebestod in German Romanticism.” Here Saul makes a convincing case for re-examining in its capacity “as a central focus of Romantic thought” (166) a theme that opponents of romanticism long regarded as evidence of its life-denying nature, but which in recent decades has been less in the forefront of critical attention. First, though, in his capacity as editor he provides three further wide-ranging and insightful contributions from Jane Brown (“Romanticism and Classicism”), Gesa Dane (“Women Writers and Romanticism”), and Carl Niekerk (“The Romantics and Other Cultures”).

The next five chapters form a subunit in their discussions of romantic philosophy and religion (Andrew Bowie), romantic politics and society (Ethel Matala de Mazza), romantic science and psychology (Jürgen Barkhoff), German romantic painters (Richard Littlejohns), and romanticism and music (Bowie’s second contribution to the volume). Littlejohns deserves particular praise for providing an overview of romantic artists and their achievements in the areas of landscape, political, and religious art that also gives a vivid sense of individual paintings and drawings—so much so that it seems as though there were more illustrations provided than the two black-and-white reproductions of Caspar David Friedrich’s Das Kreuz im Gebirge (1808) and Runge’s Morgen (1803). The volume concludes with Margarete Kohlenbach’s survey “Transformations of German Romanticism 1830–2000,” which ranges from Heine and Nietzsche through French symbolism and neo-romanticism (with a special focus on Hugo von Hofmannsthal) to the Frankfurt School and contemporary writers like Botho Strauß and Peter Handke. [End Page 327]

With the exception of Saul (less) and Kohlenbach (slightly more), each author has written essays between fifteen and twenty printed pages in length. All the contributions are scholarly and accessibly written, with observations of value both to specialists and to individuals seeking a good preliminary guide to the topic at hand. Some chapters have more extensive notes than others, but all conclude with select bibliographies of relevant scholarship for those readers interested in further investigations. In addition, Saul provides a concise but well chosen guide to further reading (291–304) for the volume as a whole, subdivided into sections on editions, works in English translation, and secondary literature relating to general topics, authors, genres, and themes. Similarly user-friendly is the extensive index (305–35), which includes entries not only for authors and their works, but...

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