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 provides an account of the development of ideas about nature from the Early German Romantics into the philosophies of nature of Schelling and Hegel. In clear and accessible language, Alison Stone explains how the project of philosophy of nature took shape and made sense in the post-Kantian context. She also shows how ideas of nature were central to the philosophical and literary projects of the Early German Romantics, with attention to Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and Hölderlin. Stone advances a distinctive, original perspective on Romantic and Idealist accounts of nature and their ethical implications regarding human-nature relations and intra-human political relations, especially but not only around gender and race. The book demonstrates how these approaches to nature have contemporary relevance to a range of current debates such as those over naturalism, the environmental crisis, and the politics of gender, race and colonialism.

The Greeks are on trial. They have been for generations, if not millennia, from Rome in the First century, to Romanticism in the Nineteenth. We debate the place of the Greeks in the university curriculum, in New World culture - we even debate the place of the Greeks in the European Union. This book notices the lingering and half-hidden presence of the Greeks in some strange places - everywhere from the U.S. Supreme Court to the Modern Olympic Games - and in doing so makes an important new contribution to a very old debate.

This book introduces the reader to the literary work and to an understanding of its cultural background and its specific features, presenting basic topics and ideas in their historical context and development in Western culture.

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.