Romantische Thermodynamik: Dichtung, Natur Und Die Verwandlung Der Kräfte 1770-1830

The power of poetry, a topos since Plato, undergoes a radical transformation in literary texts between 1770 and 1830. Concepts of divine or unconscious inspiration or of the overwhelming impacts of poetry are recast in notions of the transformative potentials of poetry. The author discusses these reconfigurations of poetic power in the context of early thermodynamic thinking, where the world presents itself not as a mechanism but as a self-organised metabolism. In images of nature as well as in machine-like arrangements for burning and consuming, breathing and eating, Goethe and Novalis develop models of a formal dynamic that, along with Herder and W. v. Humboldt, can be understood as energeia, i.e., as continuous shaping and reshaping.

Author: Cornelia Zumbusch
Publisher: de Gruyter
Published: 10/23/2023
Pages: 424
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.50lbs
Size: 9.53h x 6.06w x 1.26d
ISBN: 9783111252971
Language: German

About the Author

Cornelia Zumbusch, *1972 Kabul; since 2013, Professor of Modern German Literature, University of Hamburg, specialising in 18th and 19th century literature; since 2015, Codirector Warburg-Haus Hamburg; since 2019, spokesperson DFG Collaborative Research Group "Imaginarien der Kraft", research interests include problems of poetics and the genesis of literary forms, as well as questions posed by image and cultural studies around and after 1900