Maike Oergel

This interdisciplinary study examines the impact of the emerging awareness of historicity on the concepts of modernity, identity, and culture as they developed in German thought around 1800. It shows how this awareness determined the German notion of the priority of cultural identity. Key texts from Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism, German Romanticism and German Idealism, including Goethe’s Faust I and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, are contextualised in relation to post-Enlightenment debates on historicity and modernity. The study traces the modification of the Enlightenment concepts of perfectibility and universal ideals to accommodate the new notion of temporal particularity and impermanence. This is achieved by embedding these once static concepts in a historical process that is powered by a self-prompting internal dialectic. Through synthetic absorption within the historical succession the dialectical process allows for the continuity of values, while leaving room for discontinuity and difference by relying on oppositional successions. The study reveals close connections between the intellectual concerns, the literary ambitions, and the endeavours to construct a modern German identity during this period, which suggests a far greater intellectual coherence of the Goethezeit regarding intellectual challenges and objectives than has been previously assumed.

Historicity in German Literature and Thought 1770-1815

Culture and Identity

By placing the two phenomena next to each other and drawing on a variety of disciplines, Oergel (German, U. of Nottingham) demonstrates a parallel rise of interest in and interpretation of national identity in the two Germanic cultures. He looks at both the mythical and the national elements of national myth, and explores the new definitions of both Northern Germanic and the medieval. Focusing on Tennyson's Idylls of the King and Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen he questions assumptions about German particularity during the Victorian period. He also places the phenomena in a wider European context. Excerpts in German are translated in footnotes. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

National Myth in Nineteenth-century English and German Literature

The Return of King Arthur and the Nibelungen

This book investigates the emergence of the modern concept of zeitgeist, the notion of a pervasive contemporary coherence, in the late 18th century. It traces zeitgeist’s descent from genius saeculi and investigates its association with public spirit and public opinion before surveying its prominence around the Wars of Liberation in Germany and during the politically restless 1820s in England. This trajectory shows that zeitgeist emerged from the 18th-century discourses about culture and the public functioning of social collectives. Under the impact of the French Revolution the term came to describe social processes of political and cultural challenge. Zeitgeist was discussed as a social dynamic in which emerging elites disseminate new ideas which find enough public approval to influence cultural and political behaviour and practice. These findings modify the view that zeitgeist eludes critical grasp and is mainly invoked for manipulative purposes by showing that the zeitgeist discussions around 1800 contributed to the formation of modern politics and capture key aspects of how ideas are disseminated within societies and across borders, providing a way of reading history horizontally.

Politics, Culture and the Public in the Age of Revolution

Zeitgeist – How Ideas Travel

National Myth in Nineteenth-Century English and German 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.

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

(Re-)Writing the Radical

Steve Giles

Contributions based on papers given at an international symposium held at the University of Nottingham in September 2001.

Maike Oergel

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