Barry Murnane – författare

The first book in English on the German Gothic in over thirty years, consisting of new essays investigating the internationality of the Gothic mode.The literary mode of the Gothic is well established in English Studies, and there is growing interest in its internationality. Gothic fiction is seen as transgressive, especially in the way it crosses borders, often illicitly -- for instance, in the form of plagiarized texts or pseudo-translations of nonexistent sources. In the 1790s, when the English Gothic novel was emerging, the real or ostensible source of many of these uncanny texts was Germany. Thisfirst book in English dedicated to the German Gothic in over thirty years is aimed at students and researchers in German Studies and English Studies, and redresses deficiencies in existing sources, which are outdated, piecemeal, or not sufficiently grounded in German Studies.The book examines the international reception of German Gothic since the 1790s heyday of the Gothic novel in Britain and Germany; traces a line of Gothic writing in German to thepresent day; and inquires into the extraliterary impact of German Gothic. Thus the essays do full justice to the Gothic as a site of conflict and exchange -- both between cultures and between discourses.Contributors:Peter Arnds, Silke Arnold-de Simine, Jürgen Barkhoff, Matthias Bickenbach, Andrew Cusack, Mario Grizelj, Jörg Kreienbrock, Barry Murnane, Victor Sage, Monika Schmitz-Emans, Catherine Smale, Andrew WebberAndrew Cusack is Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Institut für Kulturwissenschaft of the Humboldt-Universität Berlin. Barry Murnane is Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany.

This collection of essays builds on recent scholarship on German philosophies of nature (Naturphilosophie) to argue for a Romantic aesthetics grounded in nature and the real. It brings researchers from philosophy, aesthetics, and literary studies into dialogue around key writers like F. W. J. Schelling, Novalis, and the Schlegel brothers, and pushes back against some of the conventional formalist and psychologizing frameworks through which Romanticism has been viewed traditionally. Instead, these contributions develop a picture of Romanticism as not only having aimed to ‘represent’ things conceptually or linguistically, but as capable of acting on, existing within, and indeed participating in processes of worldmaking. The resulting image is of a Romanticism pushing at the boundaries of materialist and idealist conceptualizations of the real in equal measure. The contributions fall along two main axes, represented by two sections and an afterword. The first section addresses Schelling directly and explores the potential of his philosophy for literary and aesthetic theory. The second section brings Schelling into dialogue with literary practices around 1800 to address broader ramifications for our understanding of authors like Novalis, Hoffmann, Coleridge, and Droste-Hülshoff, also seeking to establish the contemporary viability of Schelling’s thought and its long-overlooked cultural ramifications, including in contemporary environmental thinking.