(Re-)Writing the Radical

Enlightenment, Revolution and Cultural Transfer in 1790s Germany, Britain and France

Maike Oergel

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9783110289855
• eBook ISBN: 9783110290110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The essays in this volume discuss the overlap between philosophical, aesthetic, and political concerns in the 1790s either in the work of individuals or in the transfer of cultural materials across national borders, which tended to entail adaptation and transformation. What emerges is a clearer understanding of the "fate" of the Enlightenment, its radicalization and its "overcoming" in aesthetic and political terms, and of the way in which political "paranoia", generated by the fear of a spreading revolutionary radicalism, facilitated and influenced the cultural transfer of the "radical".

The collection will be of interest to scholars in French, German, English, and comparative studies working on the later 18th century or early 19th century. It is of particular interest to those working on the impact of the French Revolution, those engaged in reception studies, and those researching the interface between political and cultural activites. It is also of key interest to intellectual historians of this period, as well as general historians with an interest in modern conservatism and radicalism.

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• ‘That war with softer cares may be united’: Harriet Lee, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Politics of Adaptation
• From Sentiment to Sexuality: English Werther-Stories, the French Revolution, and German Vampires
• Radical Translations: Dubious Anglo-German Cultural Transfer in the 1790s
• Goethe and Schiller, Peasants and Students: Weimar and the French Revolution
• Revolution, Abolition, Aesthetic Sublimation: German Responses to News from France in the 1790s
• Print and Preserve: Periodicals in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany
• Aesthetics and Politics in the Journal London und Paris (1798–1815)
• Changing Authorities on HMS Bounty: The Public Images of William Bligh and Fletcher Christian in the Context of Late Eighteenth-Century Political and Intellectual Conditions
• A Fictional Response to the Categorical Imperative: Women Refugees, Servants, and Slaves in Charrière’s Trois Femmes
• Sade, Revolution, and the Boundaries of Freedom
• Impossible Crossings: Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion and the Aesthetic Foundation of Democracy
• Événements de Circonstance: The Classical Tradition in the Age of Revolution
• Detours of Knowledge: Aspects of Novalis’ Aesthetic Epistemology
• Challenging Time(s): Memory, Politics, and the Philosophy of Time in Jean Paul’s Quintus Fixlein
• Xavier de Maistre and Angelology
• Introducing the Songs with Inspiration: William Blake, Lavater, and the Legacy of Felix Hess
• The Contributors