Dante in Deutschland : : An Itinerary of Romantic Myth / / Daniel DiMassa.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2022 English
• VerfasserIn: DiMassa, Daniel,
• Place / Publishing House: Lewisburg, PA : : Bucknell University Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: New Studies in the Age of Goethe
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (228 p.) :; 6 b&w images

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, no task seemed more urgent to German Romantics than the creation of a new mythology. It would unite modern poets and grant them common ground, and bring philosophers and the Volk closer together. But what would a new mythology look like? Only one model sufficed, according to Friedrich Schlegel: Dante’s Divine Comedy. Through reading and juxtaposing canonical and obscure texts, Dante in Deutschland shows how Dante’s work shaped the development of German Romanticism; it argues, all the while, that the weight of Dante’s influence induced a Romantic preoccupation with authority: Who was authorized to create a mythology? This question—traced across texts by Schelling, Novalis, and Goethe—begets a Neo-Romantic fixation with Dantean authority in the mythic ventures of Gerhart Hauptmann, Rudolf Borchardt, and Stefan George. Only in Thomas Mann’s novels, DiMassa asserts, is the Romantics’ Dantean project ultimately demythologized.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- FIGURES -- ABBREVIATIONS -- A NOTE ON TRANSLATION -- Introduction: Orienting Romanticism -- Part I Romanticism -- CHAPTER ONE Discovering Dante and Theorizing Myth: The Schlegel Brothers and the Origins of the Romantic Project -- CHAPTER TWO Schelling, Novalis, and the Legitimation of a Dantean Mythology -- CHAPTER THREE Goethe’s Dantean Mythologies of the Self and of the World -- Part II Neo-Romanticism -- CHAPTER FOUR Trespassing the Sign: The Mad Flight of Gerhart Hauptmann -- CHAPTER FIVE Abolishing History: New Dantean Germanies in Rudolf Borchardt and Stefan George -- CHAPTER SIX Thomas Mann and the Demythologization of Dante -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- ABOUT THE AUTHOR