Mattias Pirholt - Böcker

This volume re-examines traditional interpretations of the rise of modern aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain and Germany. It provides a new account that connects aesthetic experience with morality, science, and political society. In doing so, it challenges long-standing teleological narratives that emphasize disinterestedness and the separation of aesthetics from moral, cognitive, and political interests.The chapters are divided into three thematic parts. The chapters in Part I demonstrate the heteronomy of eighteenth-century British aesthetics. They chart the evolution of aesthetic concepts and discuss the ethical and political significance of the aesthetic theories of several key figures: namely, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Part II explores the ways in which eighteenth-century German, and German-oriented, thinkers examine aesthetic experience and moral concerns, and relate to the work of their British counterparts. The chapters here cover the work of Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Madame de Staël. Finally, Part III explores the interrelation of science, aesthetics, and a new model of society in the work of Goethe, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Friedrich Hölderlin, and William Hazlitt, among others.This volume develops unique discussions of the rise of aesthetic autonomy in the eighteenth century. In bringing together well-known scholars working on British and German eighteenth-century aesthetics, philosophy, and literature, it will appeal to scholars and advanced students in a range of disciplines who are interested in this topic.The Introduction and Chapters 2, 10, and 12 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This volume re-examines traditional interpretations of the rise of modern aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain and Germany. It provides a new account that connects aesthetic experience with morality, science, and political society. In doing so, it challenges long-standing teleological narratives that emphasize disinterestedness and the separation of aesthetics from moral, cognitive, and political interests.The chapters are divided into three thematic parts. The chapters in Part I demonstrate the heteronomy of eighteenth-century British aesthetics. They chart the evolution of aesthetic concepts and discuss the ethical and political significance of the aesthetic theories of several key figures: namely, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Part II explores the ways in which eighteenth-century German, and German-oriented, thinkers examine aesthetic experience and moral concerns, and relate to the work of their British counterparts. The chapters here cover the work of Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Madame de Staël. Finally, Part III explores the interrelation of science, aesthetics, and a new model of society in the work of Goethe, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Friedrich Hölderlin, and William Hazlitt, among others.This volume develops unique discussions of the rise of aesthetic autonomy in the eighteenth century. In bringing together well-known scholars working on British and German eighteenth-century aesthetics, philosophy, and literature, it will appeal to scholars and advanced students in a range of disciplines who are interested in this topic.The Introduction and Chapters 2, 10, and 12 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Reconsiders the role played by mimesis - and by Goethe's Wilhelm Meister as a mimetic work - in the novels of Early German Romanticism.Mimesis, or the imitation of nature, is one of the most important concepts in eighteenth-century German literary aesthetics. As the century progressed, classical mimeticism came increasingly under attack, though it also held its position in the works of Goethe, Schiller, and Moritz. Much recent scholarship construes Early German Romanticism's refutation of mimeticism as its single distinguishing trait: the Romantics' conception of art as the very negationof the ideal of imitation. In this view, the Romantics saw art as production (poiesis): imaginative, musical, transcendent. Mattias Pirholt's book not only problematizes this view of Romanticism, but also shows that reflections on mimesis are foundational for the German Romantic novel, as is Goethe's great pre-Romantic novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Among the novels examined are Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde, shown to be transgressive in its use of the aesthetics of imitation; Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, interpreted as an attempt to construct the novel as a self-imitating world; and Clemens Brentano's Godwi, seen to signal the endof Early Romanticism, both fulfilling and ironically deconstructing the self-reflective mimeticism of the novels that came before it.Mattias Pirholt is a Research Fellow in the Department of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Offering an interdisciplinary approach to conceptual history, Concepts of Culture broadens its scope through a series of experimental case studies in ‘applied conceptual history’. Bringing together Contributors from a variety of disciplines—including art history, comparative literature, cultural studies, German studies, and history— it offers a range of theoretically reflected applications of conceptual history that focus on the cultural concepts, and thereby contribute to the methodological development of these particular fields of research.

This volume looks to core ideas defining Goethe’s work and his influence on his contemporaries and inheritors. Contributions to this volume explore his impact through ideas of organic and aesthetic formation; methods of biology, reason, becoming, and Bildung; modes of self-conscious comportment to nature, art, and the self; and conceptions of finitude and divinity. This volume underscores the interdisciplinary impact of Goethe’s thought and work. Of particular note is Goethe's unified and non-reductive account of nature, human education, social life, and reason. These contributions shed light on how Goethe's thought furthers the methodological sciences of his day while yielding resources for the grounding of theories of art in principles of idealism as well as imminent critiques of idealism through insights about organic formation and activity. The result is a compelling sense of unity through plurality. Contributors: James Conant, Richard Eldridge, Camilla Flodin, Michael Forster, Gerad Gentry, Keren Gorodeisky, Johannes Haag, Joel Lande, Lara Ostaric, Mattias Pirholt, Anne Pollok, Karin Schutjer, Allen Speight, Joan Steigerwald, Violetta Waibel, David Wellbery.