The Epic Imaginary: Political Power and Its Legitimations in Eighteenth-Century German Literature (Studien Zur Deutschen Literatur)

Charlton Payne

ISBN 10: 311027194X / ISBN 13: 9783110271942

Published by de Gruyter, 2012

About this Item

Hardcover, viii + 215 pages, NOT ex-library. Clean and bright throughout with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Boards show mild handling wear. Published without a dust jacket. -- This study analyzes how the imagination of the epic genre as legitimately legitimating community also unleashes an ambivalence between telling coherent - and hence legitimating - stories of political community and narrating open-ended stories of contingency that might de-legitimate political power. Manifest in eighteenth-century poetics above all in the disjunction between programmatic definitions of the epic and actual experiments with the genre, this ambivalence can also arise within a single epic over the course of its narrative. The present study thus traces how particular eighteenth-century epics explore an originary incompleteness of political power and its narrative legitimations. The first chapter sketches an overview of how eighteenth-century writers construct an imaginary epic genre that is assigned the task of performing the cultural work of legitimating political communities by narrating their allegedly unifying origins and borders. The subsequent chapters, however, explore how the practice of epic storytelling in works by Klopstock, Goethe, Wieland, and, in an epilogue, Brentano enact the disruptive potential of poetic language and narrative to question the legitimations of imaginary political origins and unities. -- Contents: Introduction: The Epic Imaginary in 18th-Century German Literature [The Imaginary; The Epic Imaginary and Literary History; Epic and Political Poetics]; 1. The Epic Genre and the Question of Legitimacy in Eighteenth-Century Poetics [Legitimations I: Gottsched; Legitimations II: Bodmer and Breitinger; Blankenburg 1774: The Theory of the Novel; Blankenburg's Literarische Zusätze zu Johann Georg Sulzers Allgemeiner Theorie der Schönen Künste (1796-1798): "Der neuere Held"; Merck: Epic Naiveté; Herder: "Genealogie älterer Meister"]; 2. The Epic Prosody of the Sublime Nation: Klopstock's Messias [The Mimesis of the Epic and Epic Mimesis: Klopstock's Theory of Hexameter as "Darstellung"; The High Priests of the Nation: Klopstock's Supplementary; Epic Community; Excursus: The Passions of Klopstock and Badiou]; 3. The Politics and Poetics of Epic World Citizenship in Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea [Figures of Character; The Laws of Epic Poetry]; 4. Wieland's Parodic Humanism [Wieland's Parodic Humanism: Oberon in Context (Part I); "Das Volk," Cosmopolitanism, and Sovereignty in Wieland's Political Essays; Irregularity in Wieland's Humanism: Oberon Beyond Parody]; Epilogue: Brentano's Romanzen vom Rosenkranz and the Romantic Epic [A.W. Schlegel's Anthropology of Poetry: Or, the Birth of Meter out of the Nature of Rhythm; Philological Legitimacy and the Invention of Romantic Epic; Romanzen vom Rosenkranz]; Bibliography; Index of Subjects & Names. Seller Inventory # 005382

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Epic Imaginary: Political Power and Its ...

Publisher: de Gruyter

Publication Date: 2012

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis:

This study traces how calls for poetic legitimations of community led particular eighteenth-century epics to explore an originary incompleteness of political power and its narrative legitimations. The analysis uncovers a new type of epic emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century in texts by Klopstock, Goethe, Wieland, and Brentano that enacts the disruptive potential of poetic language and narrative to question the legitimations of imaginary political origins and unities.

About the Author:

Charlton Payne, Plattform Weltregionen und Interaktionen, Universitat Erfurt, Germany.