Idealism and Romanticism

Stone, Alison and Valpione, Giulia (2024) Idealism and Romanticism. In: The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in the German Tradition :. Oxford University Press (OUP), Oxford, pp. 372-399. ISBN 9780190066239

Abstract

The chapter discusses the contributions to idealism and romanticism made by Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, Sophie Schubart-Mereau, Sophie Tieck, Karoline von Günderrode, Dorothea Tieck, and Bettina Brentano von Arnim. The authors will consider these women’s contributions to political philosophy, to philosophy of nature, to romantic translation theory, and to the idea of self. The chapter starts with Mereau’s, Veit’s, Sophie Tieck’s, and Caroline Schlegel-Schelling’s critiques of Fichte’s self-positing self in favor of a conception of self as relational, affective, and linguistic. The chapter then focuses on the role of Caroline Schlegel-Schelling and Dorothea Tieck in the German translation of Shakespeare’s plays and their translation theory. The third section focuses on the relation between love, birth, and death in Schlegel-Schelling, and the role that this relation plays in Günderrode’s philosophy of nature. The chapter closes with a discussion of the original contributions of Karoline von Günderrode and Bettina Brentano von Arnim in romantic political philosophy.