Women Writers' Philosophy of Love in German Romanticism - (Amsterdamer Beiträge Zur Neueren Germanistik) by Renata T Fuchs (Hardcover)

About the Book

Women writers contributed to the philosophy of German Romanticism by challenging rigid dichotomies of classs, gender, and ethnicity. Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karoline von Günderrode, and Bettina Brentano von Arnim provided a model for shaping intellectual life in the modern world while retheorizing the concepts of love.

Book Synopsis

This monograph spotlights women writers' contributions to the philosophy of German Romanticism. Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karoline von Günderrode, and Bettina Brentano von Arnim suggested a new vision for an emancipated community of women that develops through philosophical discourse of Progressive Universal Poetry. Their personal, fictionalized, and literary letters reinvent and retheorize the Romantic notions of sociability, symphilosophy, and sympoetry, as theorized by men, and retheorize the concepts of love. They provided a model for shaping intellectual and cultural life in the modern world while challenging rigid dichotomies of classs, gender, and ethnicity.

About the Author

Renata T. Fuchs received her PhD from the UIUC in 2014. She has published on women's authorship in XVIII and XIX centuries as well as on contemporary German literature thematizing alterity, migration, and neo-nomadism. Her most recent article contributes to The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in the German Tradition (2024).