ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book traces the consequences of that transformation, in Friedrich Holderlin's poetry and in the philosophical aftermath of post-Kantianism up to the final decade of the nineteenth century. It investigates what happened to the post-Kantian concept of Spirit in the nineteenth century, and in so doing discuss a number of figures who have never been treated together before. The book provides an extended comparison of Eduard Morike and Gerard Manley Hopkins. It bears a passing resemblance to, but is crucially different from, recent important attempts to understand the significance of post-Kantian philosophy for literature. Coleridge forms the centre of most accounts of the relationship between German and English literature and thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The books also allow us to make extensive comparisons between writers in German and English never before treated together.