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  • Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity by Christine Lehleiter
  • Linda Dietrick
Christine Lehleiter. Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity. New Studies in the Age of Goethe. Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press and Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. 325 pp. US $ 100.00 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-1-61148-565-3.

This important and original work of literary history and criticism tackles a question that still concerns us today: to what extent does our genetic inheritance determine who we are? As Christine Lehleiter shows, long before Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin, a troubling thought cast doubt on the idea of the free, autonomous self: namely that one’s body, the material basis of the self, might shape one’s future Bildung. The period of focus is Romanticism or the Sattelzeit (1770–1830), when the old notion of inheritance in the sense of rank and privilege had given way to the bourgeois Enlightenment idea of infinite potential. Yet the field that would soon become known as biology was producing ever more knowledge related to inheritance in the modern sense: knowledge about reproduction, the origins of new life, the passing on of traits from parent to child, practices such as cross-breeding and hybridization, and pathologies related to inbreeding. This knowledge in turn called into question in various ways the autonomy of the self. For if individuals can be physically altered by something that moves from one generation to the next, or if new species can emerge, then the mind or spirit is constrained by matter and the body. Lehleiter endeavours to [End Page 287] show what three exemplary writers – Goethe, Jean Paul, and E. T. A. Hoffmann – knew about these issues and how they grappled with them in, respectively, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (the Mignon episode), Der Komet, and Elixiere des Teufels.

A comprehensive opening chapter surveys the scientific discoveries and debates in the eighteenth century. It turns out that even though the concept of gene transfer was still a long way in the future, the understanding of heredity as trait transmission was already well developed in the field of animal husbandry. Lehleiter synthesizes secondary research on the prehistory of genetics in animal breeding as well as more generally on the shift from preformationism to epigenesis in the understanding of reproduction. While indicating her indebtedness to Helmut Müller-Sievers’s Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy and Literature around 1800 (1997), she makes the valid point that epigenesis still did not account for the phenomenon of hereditary transmission of traits. After a careful exegesis of Kant’s use of the terms Keim and Anlage in his essay on race, she turns to the reception in Germany of English methods of (in)breeding sheep. The idea that one breed (German Rasse) of sheep could be transformed over generations into another raised concerns about the stability of nature.

In the case of Goethe, this led him to insist on the limits to such transformations, which for Lehleiter is evidence that he was not an evolutionist. Here I had difficulties: “breed” and the more problematic “race” are used interchangeably in a discussion of hereditary change that leads somewhat abruptly to the question of species transformation. Without much transition, Lehleiter arrives at the conclusion that “eighteenth-century thinkers in Germany remain safely within the idea of a stable nature” while insisting “on a limited and unchangeable number of species or types” (55–56). Although Chapter 3 argues convincingly that Jean Paul recoiled at the idea of species evolution, neither here nor in the Goethe chapter am I able to find a detailed engagement with e.g. Robert J. Richards’s view that Goethe, like Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather), believed in a certain limited form of evolution. Yet I assume that the main point here is that it was limited: teleological and without the concept of natural selection. As formulated in the Introduction, “precisely because Romantic thinkers rejected the idea of evolution, they could develop a strong notion of selfhood” (4). I would be inclined to state it more cautiously: for writers around 1800, autonomous selfhood and the shaping forces of heredity (or biology) were conflicting, mutually limiting ideas. The chapter ends with a study of gender...

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