During the Romantic era, many in Germany believed music to be the highest art form, representing the quintessence of Romanticism and able to express what could not be expressed in words. This book studies the work of composers during this period and examines the cross-over between music and literature.

A stimulating new approach to understanding the relationship between music and culture in the long nineteenth century.

Explains the development of Romantic arts and culture in Germany, with both individual artists and key themes covered in detail.

Professor Behler provides a view of the literary work and the artistic process developed in the German Romantic period.

Crosses disciplinary boundaries to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience and the interplay of text and image in Romantic epistemology. The work of the groundbreaking writers and artists of German Romanticism -- including the writers Tieck, Brentano, and Eichendorff and the artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge -- followed from the philosophical arguments of the German Idealists, who placed emphasis on exploring the subjective space of the imagination. The Romantic perspective was a form of engagement with Idealist discourses, especially Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Fichte's Science of Knowledge. Through an aggressive, speculative reading of Kant, the Romantics abandoned the binary distinction between the palpable outer world and the ungraspable space of the mind's eye and were therefore compelled to develop new terms for understanding the distinction between "internal" and "external." In this light, Brad Prager urges a reassessment of some of Romanticism's major oppositional tropes, contending that binaries such as "self and other," "symbol and allegory," and "light and dark," should be understood as alternatives to Lessing's distinction between interior and exterior worlds. Prager thus crosses the boundaries between philosophy, literature, and art history to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience, examining the interplay of text and image in the formulation of Romantic epistemology. Brad Prager is Associate Professor of Germanat the University of Missouri, Columbia.

What does the sublime sound like? Miranda Stanyon traces competing varieties of the sublime, a crucial modern aesthetic category, as shaped by the antagonistic intimacies between music and language. In resounding the history of the sublime over the course of the long eighteenth century, she finds a phenomenon always already resonant.

The early 19th century was a period in German art in which painting played a significant part in the cultural resurgence commonly known as the Romantic Movement. This Movement and some of its chief exponents are examined against a background of German literature, philosophy and music.

Over 130 poems by 23 poets, including Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin, Tieck, Heine, Nietzsche, many others. New literal English translations on facing pages. Introduction.

Using an illuminating method that challenges the popular notion of Romanticism as aesthetic escapism, Theodore Ziolkowski explores five institutions--mining, law, madhouses, universities, and museums--that provide the socio-historical context for German Romantic culture. He shows how German writers and thinkers helped to shape these five institutions, all of which assumed their modern form during the Romantic period, and how these social structures in turn contributed to major literary works through image, plot, character, and theme. "Ziolkowski cannot fail to impress the reader with a breadth of erudition that reveals fascinating intersections in the life and works of an artist.... He conveys the sense of energy and idealism that fueled Schiller and Goethe, Fichte and Hegel, Hoffmann and Novalis...."--Emily Grosholz, The Hudson Review "[This book] should be put in the hands of every student who is seriously interested in the subject, and I cannot imagine a scholar in the field who will not learn from it and be delighted with it."--Hans Eichner, Journal of English and Germanic Philology "Ziolkowski is among those who go beyond lip-service to the historical and are able to show concretely the ways in which generic and thematic intentions are inextricably enmeshed with local and specific institutional circumstances."--Virgil Nemoianu, MLN

Medievalism, or the reception or interpretation of the Middle Ages, was a prominent aesthetic for German opera composers in the first half of the nineteenth century. A healthy competition to establish a Germanic operatic repertory arose at this time, and fascination with medieval times served a critical role in shaping the desire for a unified national and cultural identity. Using operas by Weber, Schubert, Marshner, Wagner, and Schumann as case studies, Richardson investigates what historical information was available to German composers in their recreations of medieval music, and whether or not such information had any demonstrable effect on their compositions. The significant role that nationalism played in the choice of medieval subject matter for opera is also examined, along with how audiences and critics responded to the medieval milieu of these works. In this book, readers will gain a clear understanding of the rise of German opera in the early nineteenth century and the cultural and historical context in which this occurred. This book will also provide insight on the reception of medieval history and medieval music in nineteenth-century Germany, and will demonstrate how medievalism and nationalism were mutually reinforcing phenomena at this time and place in history.