Inventions of the Imagination : Romanticism and Beyond

by Gray, Richard T.; Halmi, Nicholas; Handwerk, Gary J.; Rosenthal, Michael A.; Vieweg, Klaus

• ISBN13: 9780295990996
• ISBN10: 0295990996
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-07-01
• Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr

Summary

The dialectic between reason and imagination forms a key element in Romantic and post-Romantic philosophy, science, literature, and art.Inventions of the Imagination, Romanticism and Beyondexplores the diverse theories and assessments of this dialectic in a collection of essays by philosophers and literary and cultural critics.By the end of the eighteenth century, an insistence on reason as the predominant human faculty had run its course, and the imagination began to emerge as another force whose contributions to human intellectual existence and productivity had to be newly calculated and constantly recalibrated. The attempt to establish a universal form of reason alongside a plurality of imaginative capacities describes the ideological program of modernism from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day. Are these two drives actually compatible with one another? Can a universal and monolithic form of reason tolerate the play, flexibility, and unpredictability of imaginative creativity? This collection chronicles some of the vicissitudes in the conceptualization and evaluation of the imagination across time and in a variety of intellectual disciplines, including philosophy, aesthetic theory, and literary studies.These essays analyze the work of a range of predominately German and British philosophers and poets, including Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Blake, Keats, and Goethe. Together they create a rich and nuanced dialogue on the roles literature, fictions, and works of art in general-understood as products of the imagination-play for and in philosophical systems.Richard T. Grayis the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood professor of Germanics at the University of Washington.Nicholas Halmiis the Margaret Candfield Fellow and Tutor in English at the University College, Oxford.Gary J. Handwerkis professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Washington.Michael A. Rosenthalis associate professor of philosophy at the University of Washington.Klaus Viewegis professor of philosophy at Friedrich Shiller University.

Author Biography

Richard T. Gray is the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington. Nicholas Halmi is University Lecturer in English Literature of the Romantic Period at Oxford University. Gary J. Handwerk is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. Michael A. Rosenthal is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. Klaus Vieweg is Professor of Philosophy at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 3
Imagination on the Move	p. 17
The Poetics of Nature: Literature and Constructive Imagination in the History of Geology	p. 26
Between Imagination and Reason: Kant and Spinoza on Fictions	p. 36
Herder on Interpretation and Imagination	p. 54
William Blake: Imagination, Vision, Inspiration, Intellect	p. 68
Imaginative Power as Prerequisite for an Aesthetics of Freedom in Friedrich Schiller's Works	p. 77
The Gentle Force Over Pictures: Hegel's Philosophical Conception of the Imagination	p. 87
The Status of Literature in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: on the Lives of Concepts	p. 102
Difficult Freedom: Hegel's Symbolic art and Schelling's Historiography in the Ages of the World (1815)	p. 121
From art to History: Schelling's Modern Mythology and the Coming Community	p. 141
"To Impose is not to Discover": A Romantic-Modernist Continuity in Contradiction	p. 159
Biographies of Editors and Contributors	p. 182
Index	p. 187
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