Facing Mental Landscapes

The first decade of the 21st century offers the possibility of a cartography of the 20th century from a short but increasingly clear distance. Central to such an undertaking, however, is the question of its predetermining structural origins in the 18th and 19th centuries; this collection of critical texts and essays is concerned with these origins. The title "Facing Mental Landscapes" and subtitle "Self-Reflections in the Mirror of Nature" programmatically refer to an individual reflecting the surrounding physical universe as a mere projection of the mind: around both 1800 and 1900, major paradigm shifts emerged from an intellectual crisis within just over two decades. In literature, fine arts and music, these radical innovations - primarily philosophically motivated - went through transformative stages in the course of the 20th century. One of the main goals of this volume therefore is to contribute to a reconstruction of these iconographic or iconoclastic formations of discourse between and within the two eras of Idealism or Romanticism and Modernism. With contributions by Jale N Erzen, László F Földényi, Ursula Franke, Christiane Heibach, Karl Hepfer, Klaus Herding, James Knowlson, Klaus Lankheit, Anett Lütteken, Manfred Milz, Tanehisa Otabe, Ulrich Pfarr, Wieland Schmied, Jörg Traeger and Christopher S Wilson.