The Miracle and Mystery of Nature

Millán Brusslan situates her discussion of the world soul in debates about the limits of reason and the domain of faith in the post-Kantian period. She focuses upon Schlegel’s critique of Jacobi’s foundationalist notion of reason grounded in faith. Jacobi and Fichte’s central roles in the development of Romantic thought are highlighted. The Jacobi-Mendelssohn Debate was a powerful philosophical springboard for Schlegel, who developed some of his central Romantic views in response to the debate. Schlegel’s critique of Jacobi’s salto mortale and of Fichte’s “world soul of cognition” gave rise to the German Romantic conception of a world soul of nature, which was part of a project to lend freedom to nature itself as part of the humble acceptance of the limits of human domination and mastery of the natural world. The manifestation of the divine in nature became a key element in the Romantic conception of the world soul.

Wasted Innocence: Children and Childhood in Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber

Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber is a classic Chinese novel dating back to 1792. This article investigates the formative experiences of the representative children from the book's four distinguished households against the unique historical and sociocultural context of premodern Chinese Confucian adulthood with all its rules for rigid regulatory order. We argue that a gap needs to be filled in the understanding of the premodern conceptions of children and childhood in Chinese literature through a detailed case study of Dream. Moreover, the novel's representation of childhood innocence as a form of resistance that draws its force from a dialectic of nature and culture provides an important alternative perspective on the Western Romantic conception. While the book is universally acknowledged as the pinnacle of traditional Chinese fiction, it should also be fully recognised as one of the most important precursors to modern and contemporary Chinese children's literature.

Imagination and Memory: Inter-movement Thematic Recall in Beethoven and Brahms

Like several of his predecessors, Brahms reintroduces themes from one movement into a later one in several of his instrumental works. Historical circumstances and changing historical consciousness affected a composer's use of thematic recall. For Beethoven (per Elaine Sisman) recalling an earlier theme provided the creative stimulus to move forward to the end of a piece, in accordance with the linear concept of history that defined Beethoven's Enlightenment world view. Brahms's use of inter-movement thematic recall often expresses a more wistful and melancholy view of the past and focuses on the ability of recall to provide a dramatic narrative. In his earliest use of cyclical return, the Op. 5 Piano Sonata (1853), the Andante second movement is echoed and transformed by the ‘Ruckblick’ fourth movement, as Brahms plays on the poetic inscription of the former movement to raise the specter of lost love and mortality. In a more complex web of thematic recall, the op. 78 Violin Sonata (1878) combines allusions to a pre-existing pair of interrelated songs from his Op. 59 with a newly composed, recurring instrumental theme to create a multi-layered, somber character in the piece. Both of those works draw on an earlier, romantic sense of yearning for return. Near the end of his career, however, the quiet emergence and eventual dissipation of opening material at the close of the Op. 115 Clarinet Quintet (1891) reflects Brahms's awareness of his place at the end of an artistic tradition, and thereby conveys a post-Romantic conception of history.

An Old Law for a New Literature: Authors, Publishers and the Early Years of the Victorian Copyright Act 1869

This article analyses the early years of the operation of copyright legislation in the colony of Victoria, Australia. The Copyright Act 1869 (Vic) was introduced into a thriving but volatile colonial literary marketplace. The law was based almost wholly on the UK law at the time, existing in a very different environment. This article notes that despite the rhetoric of the protection of the right of authors as an aim of the law, the effect was something quite different. We examine the use of copyright by some key players in that colonial market, both publishers and authors. That analysis reveals that the prophetic words of George Higinbotham, that the law was not for the protection of the author, but the publisher, can be demonstrated to be true. This is evident both in the implementation of the law itself and in a number of inconsistencies in its operation. We conclude that, despite public and parliamentary rhetoric drawing on the romantic conception of the author as creator, the law’s conception of the author as proprietor offered little protection to local Australian authors writing new literature for a new country.

Science and Capitalism as ‘Background’

This chapter explores the work of two figures of somewhat lesser stature who nonetheless had a considerable influence on interpretations of intellectual and literary history between the 1930s and 1960s. It discusses Basil Willey’s work, especially The Seventeenth-Century Background, emphasizing the ways in which it adapted or reworked Eliot’s account of the seventeenth century into a more Romantic conception of the threat to religion and poetry posed by the rise of science. It then moves on to examine the work of L. C. Knights, especially his Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, showing how it is informed by a conception of the role of economic thinking in modern society and the search for a socially grounded ethical alternative to it, which Knights found still existing in late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature. The chapter illustrates just how much history can be smuggled into literary studies via the notion of ‘background’.

Framing the Romantic Artist: Goethe’s Torquato Tasso and James’s Roderick Hudson

Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Torquato Tasso (1790) and Henry James’s Roderick Hudson (1875) share not only a number of structural parallels but also an interest in the fate of the romantic artist in a regulated society. The article suggests Goethe’s play as a possible influence on James’s novel. After a brief outline of James’s relationship to Goethe and of the structural parallels between the texts, the article discusses the similarities of their stance on the romantic artist. Both texts contrast the protagonist’s classicist-idealist art with his broadly romantic personality, both remain ambivalent about the romantic conception of the poet-genius, and both take an analytical attitude toward their artist figures. On this poetological level, the article concludes, their portraits of a proto-Romantic and a late Romantic respectively form a revealing historical frame of the phenomenon of the Romantic artist.

What is an open mind?

In this article, I suggest that an open mind wholly unburdened by preconceptions and prejudgments is a mistaken ideal. Not only is it unrealistic; it deprives us of context and background knowledge relevant to judging well. I begin with two cases that show how the ideal of the “prejudice-free” mind, though appealing, may end up thwarting good judgment: blind assessment and “blank-slate” jury selection (the ideal of empaneling jurors without prejudgments). I then trace the prejudice-free ideal to the Enlightenment, exposing its roots in the subject-object worldview. Drawing on Heidegger, I suggest that the subject-object worldview is misguided and that all judgment involves a prior understanding of the matter we judge. To have an open mind, paradoxically, is to have a stake in defending a prior understanding, to be possessed of an understanding of the good that one wishes (at least provisionally) to promote. I then draw out the implications of this view for how we might make sense of cultural differences, examining the difference between the practice of marriage based on a romantic conception of love, and that of arranged marriage. By thinking through these two practices, seemingly opposed, we can arrive at a conception of marriage and love that preserves both.

Max Scheler and Jan Patočka on the First World War

The First World War was both an historical and a philosophical event. Philosophers engaged in what Kurt Flasch aptly called "the spiritual mobilization" of philosophy. Max Scheler was particularly important among these "war philosophers", given that he was the one who penned some of the most influential philosophical writings of the First World War, among them Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg. As I aim to show, Max Scheler's war writings were crucial for Jan Patočka's interpretation of the First World War in the sixth of his Heretical Essays. However, the importance of Scheler's war writings goes far beyond the First World War for Patočka, since they offer Patočka a far-reaching interpretation of the 'excessive' character of the 20th century. As I will show through the example of Max Scheler, the German war philosophers succumbed to a dangerously romantic conception of "force" – and it is this ominous force, which Patočka takes to lie at the root of the increasingly excessive character of the 20th and 21st centuries.