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This thesis employs a close reading of archival and published sources to explore the origins of colour vision science in 19th century Britain. By drawing attention to wide ranging dialogues and disagreements between diverse figures with different visions of colour, including physicists David Brewster, James Clerk Maxwell, and Lord Rayleigh, politician and philologist William Gladstone, ophthalmologists Frederick Edridge-Green and Robert Carter, and anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers, I show that 19th century colour vision science was not narrowly confined to the quantification, measurement, and classification of colours. It was instead shaped by deeper metaphysical questions and wider political concerns. These questions and concerns included the implications of natural law, free-will, and materialism for scientific understandings of reality, the limits of Darwinian understandings of humanity, the legitimacy of scientific experts and institutions in determining public policy, and the history, future, and advancement of civilization. I argue that the widespread use of spinning discs as an experimental research technology, promoted by Brewster and Maxwell, combined with the mainstream acceptance of Maxwell's theoretical model of 'coterminal response curves', generated conflicts between competing understandings of perception, vision, and colour in the second half of the 19th century. These conflicts stemmed from the establishment of new conventions, inspired by Maxwell's work, which held that scientists should maintain a practical and analytical distance from their own visual experiences, that the visual experiences of test subjects should be treated as untrustworthy phenomena in need of further analysis, and that the meaning of subjective experiences are contained within, and revealed by, mathematical models that accord with a rational understanding of the physical world. These practical and metaphysical approaches to the meaning of human experience did not end with the conflicts they generated in the second half of the 19th century but continue to bear on broader contemporary understandings of truth and illusion in scientific practice and popular imagination.

Notes from Underground is Dostoevsky’s most intense examination of the fundamental psychological basis of society and politics, and was conceived as a polemical response to the utopian socialism of Nihilists like Nikolai Chernyshevsky. This dissertation presents a new interpretation of Notes from Underground, and in particular its argument against utopian socialism, based on a comparison with the German Sturm und Drang movement and related literary and philosophical texts. It is usually assumed that Dostoevsky’s problem with utopian socialism is that it curtails individual liberties to an unacceptable degree, since human beings have an innate need for freedom. I argue that the appeal of this reading rests on the ambiguity of the word “freedom,” and that when its conceptual foundations are clarified, it leads to serious inconsistencies in Dostoevsky’s social thought. The need for an entirely new approach thereby becomes evident. Having examined and clarified the meaning of relevant portions of the novel, I find that for Dostoevsky it is not the need for freedom that renders utopian socialism psychologically inadequate, but the need for deeper spiritual fulfilment. By placing the novel in its broader historical context, I show that this new approach can be illuminated and justified with reference to German philosophy and literature, and the works of Friedrich Schiller in particular. The influence of Schiller on Dostoevsky is well known, but it has not been sufficiently appreciated by those interested in his social and political philosophy. I argue that Notes from Underground should be seen as a revival of psychological themes from the Sturm und Drang movement to which Schiller contributed, and, crucially, that these themes are the linchpin of Dostoevsky’s polemic against utopian socialism. The Sturm und Drang movement was a reaction against the demystification of human nature by Enlightenment philosophy; its anti-heroes represented the psychological and spiritual dangers of this demystification and the lack of spiritual fulfilment it entailed. Dostoevsky, I maintain, draws on these insights to argue that any ideology that rejects the spiritual needs of humanity, including utopian socialism, will lead to the dire psychological consequences illustrated extensively in Notes from Underground. Overall, I present an original reappraisal of Dostoevsky’s novel that sheds new light on this crucial intersection of his political, psychological, philosophical and religious thought.

This thesis seeks to explain the reasons behind Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's critical response to the French Revolution, and to identify his broader political views. It casts Goethe as a reform-minded conservative, who strove to advance civilisation and law-abiding liberty, and deplored tyranny, whether of the few or of the many. He deemed the Revolution politically and socially destructive, as it countered Enlightenment values of reason, tolerance, independent thought, and self-cultivation. While acknowledging the faults of the traditional ruling elite of the monarchy and aristocracy, Goethe also recognised the inherently flawed nature of human beings. This led him to support modest changes to redress specific grievances, rather than to overturn an entire political system in the utopian hope of realising a vice-ridden 'brotherhood of Man'. The fictional works indicate an author who favoured clearly definable freedoms over an abstract 'universal' freedom, who believed that BÃ1⁄4rger should develop their intellect and find an occupation best suited to their personal attributes, and that the most temperate and politically astute among them should influence government by co-operating with aristocrats. Goethe also portrays the fall of the ancien régime as largely self-inflicted, presenting many selfish and gullible courtiers, and incompetent kings. He appears to lament its demise, however, and not wish for a repeat in Germany, as the insurgent Bürger-dominated and/or republican regimes seem even more reckless. The advocates of 'liberté, égalité, fraternité' generally come across as perilously naïve or fraudulent, often using altruistic rhetoric to conceal egocentric and vindictive aims. The best cure for a flagging regime is (sometimes considerable) reform, not revolution. Political power should be treated with humility and self-restraint, and the relationship between rulers and subjects should be as intimate as possible. Above all, no part of the social hierarchy should suffer oppression from another, and people should be free to express various opinions, and criticise their government. For Goethe, the Revolution thwarted such principles.

The thesis examines the principal works of Charles Darwin to determine whether there is any evidence of Romantic concepts in his writings and whether, therefore, he owes a debt to the Romantics such as Alexander von Humboldt and Goethe. The first two chapters of the thesis trace the influence of Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) on Charles Darwin (1809-1882). There are frequent references to Humboldt in Darwin’s works. Humboldt’s Romantic concepts of Nature, expressed in his Personal Narrative [1807 – 1834] and in his later Cosmos [1845], are compared to Darwin’s concepts of Nature in his On the Origin of Species [1859, first edition]. An analysis of Humboldt shows him firmly within the German Romantic school of thought with influences from Schelling and Goethe, especially concerning the concept of Mind. Humboldt’s method of analysing Nature aesthetically had a profound effect on Darwin’s own imaginative view of Nature. Further analysis of this method, coupled with Goethe’s ‘Genetic Method’ of moving between the particular and the infinite when seeing the ‘leaf’ and ‘vertebrae’ archetypes, shows strong evidence of the influence of the German Romantics on the development of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. In analysing the Romantic concept of a ‘One Reality Nature’, the thesis shows that Darwin’s evidence of a common progenitor provides a moral imperative for treating all races as equal in terms of their origins and their potential for development. In Chapter Three the origins of morality are seen by Darwin as having been generated by natural instincts rather than having come from a Creator. This is examined with reference to Darwin’s The Descent of Man [1871; 1879, second edition] within the moral and cultural context of the Victorian era in which he lived. The final Chapter Four compares The Voyage of the Beagle [1839, first edition] to Darwin’s later works to see if there are differences between his earlier and later forms of Romanticism and how easily they sit alongside Darwin the Victorian. The thesis concludes that essentially Darwin’s Romantic theme of wonder and enchantment is the same for both his early and later years. However, Darwin’s Romanticism has moved from an anthropocentric view with Man as its centre to an anthropomorphic view in which Man is seen as part of Nature but not at its centre. Darwin’s self-expression in his writing has also moved from a subjective form of poetry developed through his personal experience of Nature, to a more objective form of poetic science in which Darwin is able to step back from the science he creates. Finally, the Conclusion suggests that there is sufficient evidence in Darwin’s works to claim that he can be regarded as a Romantic materialist. This is evidenced by his view that Mind and Man’s morality have been developed by Nature’s laws out of matter. It is also evidenced by Darwin’s own mental methods of discovery through his own form of imagination and poetry, sharing some of the themes of the English Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Tennyson.

In this thesis I examine Schelling’s construction of symbolic language in §73 of his Philosophie der Kunst. I approach this construction in three ways. First, I compare Schellingian symbolic language to other contemporary theories of the symbol and language (in particular, those of Goethe, Kant and A.W. Schlegel). While Schelling’s theory of symbolic language possesses properties similar to these other theories (the identity of being and meaning, organic wholeness, the co-existence of opposites), I show that it differs in how they are interpreted. Second, I excavate the metaphysical and epistemological principles from Schelling’s philosophy of the period which underlie this theory of language. Three tenets from the Identitätssystem (as it is called) are crucial: formation, quantitative differentiation and construction. They illuminate why Schelling interprets symbolic language very differently to his contemporaries. Third, I consider the theological significance of Schellingian symbolic language. This significance is twofold. First, his theory gives rise to a conception of discourse without reference, and so to the notion of a theology without reference. On this basis, Schelling criticises Christian theology for remaining too concerned with referring to God, when what is at stake is rather the degree of intensity to which it produces God. Theology therefore stands in need of reformation. Second, the way in which theology is utilised by Schelling in order to construct symbolic language in §73 of the Philosophie der Kunst itself provides a model for reformed theological practice. I argue that Schelling conceives of traditional theology as material for intensifying the production of God. In this way, an ‘absolute theology’ is engendered which has no concern for reference or for the integrity of the theological tradition.

In his 2015 production Faust I+II, Robert Wilson fuses elements of Postdramatic theater with German classicism. In the post-Brechtian world of theater, Wilson is able to bring together elements of absolute theater, the grand operas of the nineteenth century, and the tradition of epic theater in one production. As a leading figure in the world of Postdramatic theater, Robert Wilson’s work throughout the twentieth century has made a significant impact. His Faust I+II highlights his signature design aesthetic and incorporates elements of contemporary Western culture to create a unique version of Goethe’s Faust I and Faust II. This dissertation discusses two main topics: 1) Robert Wilson’s chronological development in the world of Postdramatic theater and 2) the literary-historical development of the Faust legend. The project culminates in an in-depth discussion and close reading of Wilson’s Faust I+II.

Although Goethe was not only a literary writer, but also a lawyer and a statesman, his views on how law and why law advances have not been considered. Through a reading of Faust and the Wahlverwandtschaften, this dissertation shows that the two components of legal advancement in Goethe’s mind were narrative and gränzunbewußte arbitration [arbitration unconscious of borders]. Narratives shape the way we think, and thus affect laws and legal outcomes. As the legal significance of borders diminishes – as the legal order becomes more gränzunbewußt – narratives cross borders more easily, and their effect becomes more global. A focus on legal advancement in Goethe’s works opens a novel understanding of them. For instance, it is unclear whether Gretchen killed her child – even though she has become one of literature’s most famous child-killers. The evidence against her consists merely of contradictory narratives. The dominant narrative of infanticide in Goethe’s time dictated that only the mother could kill the child, and that is why Gretchen has been deemed guilty. The resolution of the pact between Faust and Mephistopheles can also be understood in a novel way. Mephisto’s defeat has been understood with reference to the terms of the written pact. However, it is better understood in terms of the legal advancement that has taken place since Faust I: in the gränzunbewußte legal order at the end of Faust II, Mephisto’s pact to claim Faust’s soul is no longer enforceable. The tragic ending of the Wahlverwandtschaften can be seen as the failure of legal advancement to materialize – for divorce fails to occur in spite of the fact that it has become legally possible – because the right narratives are missing, and the legal order is not gränzunbewußt.

This dissertation is a survey of nineteenth-century British Hellenism in texts authored between 1768 and 1895 by elite, bourgeois, and working-class people both female and male. Beginning in 18th-century Germany, the dissertation tracks the influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann on nineteenth-century British Hellenism, asserting that there is a characteristic cluster of representational attributes visible in British Hellenist texts that display a shared ideological emphasis. Winckelmann, who rose from humble beginnings to become the Vatican’s prefect of antiquities, bequeathed a systematic art-historical approach to classical Greek art that became an idealist discourse of British Greekness through the influence of the annual lectures given by Sir Joshua Reynolds, founding president of the Royal Academy of Art, to students between 1768 and 1792. Posthumously the ‘Grand Style’ aesthetics Reynolds promulgated became highly politicized, its influence clear in the debates surrounding the parliamentary purchase of the Parthenon Marbles from Lord Elgin in 1816, in the poetry, prose, art and architecture of the 1820s and 1830s, in specific exhibits at the Great Exhibition of 1851, in the anthropological debates touched off by Darwin’s Origins of Species after 1859, and in Oscar Wilde’s fin-de-siécle advocacy of Dress Reform and his reformed, Reynoldsian aesthetic idealism. Particularly during Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trials, the political valence of nineteenth-century British Hellenism is inescapable, being explicitly enunciated in Wilde’s famous “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name” speech, but I argue throughout that nineteenth-century British Hellenism tends to create ‘enfigurations’ of subjectivity that constrain those who adopt them through insistent reference to an ideal subjectivity that is embodied in white, abled, elite, heterosexual male bodies resembling those found in classical Greek art. Thus I show that while the political valence of nineteenth-century British Hellenism could be contested, the terms of the debate remained fixed around an unmarked yet hypervisible central term, which fixity acted to foreclose radical political change throughout the nineteenth century, and particularly in the 1890s, when British sexological debates made the figure of the modern male homosexual visible at the same time that campaigns for tolerance of homosexuality were energetically quashed

Heinrich Heine’s body of work presents seeming disparities between poetry and prose, Romantic lyricism and bitter polemics, love and hate, manifesting the complexity of the author and his vision. Another fundamental yet elusive dimension of Heine’s work involves his Jewish background. Hannah Arendt provocatively described Heine as “the only German Jew who could truthfully describe himself as both a German and a Jew,” in part because he recognized their implicit conflict. His ambivalent attitude toward Jews and Judaism and German-Jewish identity is difficult to separate from his contentiousness and humor. Heine has not been taken seriously enough in part because of a disinclination to approach him as a thinker, including what the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk called Heine’s “satirical, polemical... holy nonseriousness.” At stake is a ‘politics of literature’ in the sense of how literature is evaluated or categorized. Our task is to locate Heine’s original voice and his historical and contemporary significance.This study addresses Heine’s work largely in relation to his predecessors, contemporaries, and followers. Heine’s belated dialogue with the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe involved their shared opposition to Christianity, nationalism, and Romanticism as a literary movement, as well as their love poetry reflecting the connection between their lives and their work. Heine’s engagement with German philosophy and his “Jewish” pantheism, associated with the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, anticipated Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept “God is dead.” Heine’s Ludwig Börne. A Memorial defined the late liberal, converted Jew Ludwig Börne as a Christian or Jewish, ascetic, moralistic “Nazarene,’ in contrast to Heine and Goethe as pagan, sensual, art- loving “Hellenes.” At stake in part was Heine’s modern resistance as a Jew to others’ interpretations of what is a Jew.Friedrich Nietzsche’s relation to Heine constitutes a particularly important consideration. The philosopher’s early infatuation with and later rejection of the composer Richard Wagner, announced in Nietzsche’s publication and revision of his Birth of Tragedy, can be understood as a turn back to Heine as an unacknowledged and humorous source for several of Wagner’s ideas. Nietzsche’s Dionysian outlook was anticipated by Heine’s iconoclastic response to German Hellenist interpretations of classical antiquity, although Heine combined his embrace of Dionysus with an ostensible late “conversion” to Judaism. Through his entertainingly thought- provoking art, Heine offers perhaps the definitive non-systematic thinker of profound ambivalence, internal conflicts, and radical juxtapositions of ideas, a unique ‘Jewish Dionysus.’

This paper is an exploration of several musical settings of the Gretchen character’s most poignant songs and scenes in Goethe’s "Faust." The purpose of this paper is to argue that nineteenth-century composers from Germany, (Carl Friederich Zelter, Richard Wagner, and Hugo Wolf,) Austria, (Franz Schubert) and France (Charles Gounod) chose Gretchen as the subject of their Lieder (or in Gounod’s case, enhanced her role from supporting to lead in his opera) because they recognized she was more complex than most women of her time. Throughout "Faust," Gretchen exercises an unparalleled agency that is usually denied by scholars. My purpose is to reinstate Gretchen’s agency and to show how composers added depth and subtext through their musical settings to make Gretchen stronger and an even more poignant character. In this paper, each scene is presented in chronological order; the purpose of which is twofold: First, I examine each scene based on Goethe’s “Naturformen der Dichtung” and how the three poetic forms outlined may have influenced the composers. Second, I discuss carefully selected chosen vocal music settings of these texts to show how composers portrayed Gretchen’s coming of age: her psychological and physical transformations that lead to her maturity, and the coming into her agency to reconcile herself as a sexual woman with her religious faith. Gretchen’s faith in God is very strong, but the faith she has in herself, is even stronger. Gretchen is as relevant a character today as she was in the nineteenth century. I wish to show that the interdisciplinary exchange between German Studies and Music makes for a relevant twenty-first century interpretation of this timeless character and timeless work.

One Poem, Two Settings; is a thesis, with an accompanying lecture recital, which explores the ways in which composers have set one poem to music in contrasting ways. Such poems are: Gretchen am Spinnrade/Meine Ruh ; by Johann von Goethe; Set by Franz Schubert and Richard WagnerFruhlingsglaube by Johann Ludwig Uhland; Set by Franz Schubert and Felix MendelssohnClair de Lune; by Paul Verlaine; Set by Gabriel Faure and Claude Debussy; Mandoline; by Paul Verlaine; Set by Gabriel Faure and Claude Debussy;Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind; by William Shakespeare; Set by Roger Quilter and Thomas ArneIt Was a Lover and His Lass; by William Shakespeare; Set by Roger Quilter and Thomas MorleyFor each setting, a background of the poet and composers are given, along with a synopsis of how the composers have set each poem to music differently.

During the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth-century, the Bildungsroman acted as a vehicle for artists’ reflections on the turbulent time. The Bildungsroman is especially well suited to capture the fragmentation and disillusionment characteristic of modernism because of its sensitivity to the community’s role in the individual’s social normalization. D. H. Lawrence’s autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers (1913) embodies the jarring transition from the world of the Victorian Bildungsroman to modernity. While Lawrence’s novel still relies on characteristics of the Victorian Bildungsroman, it makes a significant attempt to break away from the Victorian Bildungsroman. Lawrence uses the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis to inform protagonist Paul Morel’s development from adolescence to adulthood. Freud’s theories ground the tension between the individual and civilization in psychological terms and offer an explanation for its origin. If modernism’s creed is to make it new, as Ezra Pound suggests, Sons and Lovers stands as Lawrence’s attempt to reinvent and redirect the English Bildungsroman. Later modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf take up the Bildungsroman and create a distinctly modern iteration of the genre that reveals and highlights the artist’s unique position in his/her community through incorporating psychoanalytic theories to create a more realistic depiction of the protagonist’s psyche. But Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers represents a pivotal moment in the history of the Bildungsroman as well as in the development of modern literature.

From its origins in the early nineteenth century to its resurgence in the last decade (Casanova, Damrosch, Moretti, et al.), the concept of World Literature/Weltliteratur has challenged scholars to conceive of global literary space as the entirety of literature, the best of all literary works, or a world market of cultural exchange. While each new theory attempts to advance the perennial concept to fit its respective global era, it has gone overlooked that the concept itself is largely the result of a complex discursive history beginning with scholarship on Goethe and early globalization. This dissertation breaks from previous narratives of Weltliteratur as the idea of a sole visionary (Goethe) in order to ask not what Weltliteratur is in theory, but how it is realized through an array of approaches toward the organization of literature in a persistently changing discourse of globalization. In three case studies of such practices, this dissertation examine the first anthology of Weltliteratur, Johannes Scherr's 1848 Bildersaal der Weltliteratur; the National Socialist vision of Weltliteratur in the journal Weltliteratur: Romane, Erzählungen und Gedichte aller Zeiten und Völker (1935-1939) / Die Weltliteratur: Berichte, Leseproben und Wertung (1940-1944); and finally the digital perspective of an alternative Weltliteratur archive in the algorithm-driven organization of literature in online book commerce at Amazon.com. This dissertation demonstrates how the practices of literary mediation in these collections create, rather than reflect the notion of the world literary. In doing so, it presents a new approach to Weltliteratur, not simply as another manifestation of a nineteenth-century idea, but as practices of literary mediation with real and measurable effects on the way in which texts are translated, circulated, and read.

The insanity defense is a controversial practice that has developed over time in the Western world. This controversy is especially seen in the general public's attitude, which seems to lag behind legal and medical developments of the insanity defense and mental illness. The introduction gives an overview of the legal developments of the insanity defense in the Western world, providing a comparison between Germany and the U.S. In order to fully investigate the notion of criminal insanity in German literature, this thesis will take a close look at Faust by Goethe (enlightenment period, 1808), Der Sandmann by ETA Hoffmann (romanticism period, 1816), Bahnwarter Thiel by Gerhard Hauptmann (naturalism, 1888), and Die Blendung by Elias Canetti (expressionism, 1935). This thesis will demonstrate how the literary view of insanity develops from considering it almost a metaphysical issue (Goethe); to an artistic/demonic possession in the case of Hoffmann; to a force of nature (Thiel); to a Freudian (or anti-Freudian) perspective with Canetti. Gretchen, one of the main characters in Goethe's Faust, suffers from a bout of insanity at the end of the novel, killing her mother and drowning her child. In Hoffmann's Der Sandmann, Nathanael experiences a downward spiral into insanity during the course of his life. Similar experiences are witnessed in Hauptmann's Thiel and Canetti's Peter Kien in Die Blendung. However, for Thiel, the loss of his son leads him to murder his second wife and child, while Kien commits suicide at the end after setting fire to his library. Parallels can clearly be seen between literature and criminal law as the insanity defense has developed over these time periods. The thesis concludes with another brief look at current public attitudes towards the insanity defense, ending with the thought that even though our Western society has come a long way in the way of legal and medical developments since the Enlightenment, the public's view seems, at times, to have not changed along with these recent developments.

The connection between text, music, and performance in the lieder of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is an integral aspect to fully comprehending the style and performance of the genre. It is also essential in order to understand the full development of the lied in its totality. The era represented a transitional period in musical development, influenced by Enlightenment values of elegance, good taste, simplicity, and naturalness which sought to eradicate the overly decorative “excesses” of the high-Baroque. In this study, emphasis is placed upon the unique development of the lied in the northern German regions by the composers Johann Friedrich Reichardt and Carl Friedrich Zelter and their musical settings of the lyric poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The study also addresses the overall development of the genre as it progressed from the Baroque through Classicism/Neo-Classicism, Sturm und Drang, and into Romanticism exploring the musical settings and performance possibilities both then and now in the context of the various treatises and correspondence between the composers and poet. It seeks to effectively address the notion that these early songs were composed and performed by those versed in the ideal of music being an improvisatory/dramatic vehicle for expressing emotion and textual meaning. In opera, and to a lesser extent other vocal idioms, musico-dramatic excesses occurred in the late Baroque and the cult of the singer reigned. However, the reforms which led to the new aesthetic of naturalness did not suddenly end this improvisatory vocal performance practice. The musical complexity of the lied was gaining in prominence but not yet to the detriment of the priority of the poetic text and its effective rendering.

Jules Massenet re-imagined Goethe’s novella Die Leiden des jungen Werthers as an opera. The audience gains great psychological intimacy with Goethe’s Werther because of the Briefroman format, while the audience of Massenet’s work is forced into the third person. This results in a fundamental change in how the audience relates to the two Werthers. This project strives to understand th relationship between the two works, and to demonstrate how both the media shift and the different movements affect the narrative.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's West-ostlicher Divan combines the Persian influence of the fourteenth-century poet Hafiz with Goethe's own Germanic literary heritage. The result was a synthesis of symbolism and multivalent meanings that Goethe himself doubted could be effectively portrayed in a musical setting. Hugo Wolf composed seventeen songs with poems from three of the Divan's thirteen books. Five of these songs come from "Das Schenkenbuch," an exploration of wine and intoxication as metaphors for religious experience. This thesis explores Wolf s success in addressing the complex system of meanings and references in the poems while providing suitable settings for each individual song. The result is an inter-related set of Lieder tied together through form, key and motivic elements that provide a unified exploration of the meaning of spiritual intoxication.

This dissertation on late Enlightenment poetics and the history of the biomedical sciences unfolds a lapsed possibility near the historical beginnings of the division of labor between literary and scientific representation. Against the pressure, then and now, to treat the culture of science as context or antithesis to literary production, I recover a countervailing epistemology that cast poetry as a privileged technique of empirical inquiry: a knowledgeable practice whose figurative work brought it closer to, not farther from, the physical nature of things.In his late life science, Morphology, Goethe mischievously re-signified "objectivity" to mean an observer's vulnerability to transformation by the objects under view: "every new object, well seen, opens up a new organ in us." Such a gesture at once opens the scene of experiment to the agency of objects, and shifts biology's question from the life force within beings, to the metamorphic relations between them. From Wordsworth's call for a "science of the feelings," to Blake's for a "sweet Science," and Goethe's for a "tender Empiricism," my project argues for a series of late Enlightenment attempts to re-invent empiricist methodology - and to do so with the resources of verse and figure. These revisionary poetic sciences, I argue, challenged early biological and aesthetic protocols to countenance the mutual, material influence between the subjects and objects of experiment; to represent `bare' sensation as itself vulnerable to social and rhetorical transformation; and to position vulnerability - to impression, influence, and decay - as central, not inimical, to life.I show that writers from James Thomson and Erasmus Darwin to Percy Shelley retrieved Lucretius's classical materialism as a model for describing bodies (textual and animal) as porous assemblages, shaped by losses and incorporations of what is not self, and not immediately present. In Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, all things, decaying in time, scatter fine atomic husks from their bodies: simulacra, figurae, imagines. Here `figures' are fractions of the real estranged from their sources, and all bodies, not just poets or their language, produce them. Such an epistemology afforded poetry a strong claim upon the real, and proved particularly fit to connect the epochal interest in living bodies to the period's new sense of its own historicity. Poets deployed Lucretius's atomist imaginary in order to make historical experience palpable as what Wordsworth called an "atmosphere of sensation." The material tropes they mobilized to do so, I argue, have been unrecognizable through the symbol-allegory paradigm that controls most rhetorical readings of romanticism.Such a view of the period's philosophy of life differs from a more frequent argument, whereby romantic poetics and early biology converge in the ideal of organism or artwork as self-sufficient whole, "both cause and effect of itself" - and the ideal of life or imagination as the "power" productive of such wholes. This Kantian and Coleridgean ideal of "organic form," I argue, has overshadowed our critical understanding of what the late Enlightenment poetics of life might have sought to do. Working through the tense collaboration between the Poet and the Man of Science in Wordsworth's 1800 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads and in Blake's notion of "sweet Science" (The Four Zoas,1797), my introduction extracts two critical lenses - "matter figures back," and "atmospheres of sensation" - with which to discern the rival epistemology described in the dissertation's four body chapters. In chapters that center on, and move outward from, Goethe's poetic biology (1-2) and Shelley's "poetry of life" (3- 4) I show how a neglected strain of materialist natural curiosity sought to uncouple professionalizing biology and subject-centered aesthetics from their rhetoric of agency, autonomy, and power.In my first chapter, "Composite Life," I translate previously unavailable pieces from Goethe's microscopy logs (1785-6) and On Morphology periodicals (1817-24) as emblematic of the broader contemporary interest in studying living beings as composite, rather than organic forms. Here, each "seeming individual" is as a "being-complex," a fractious "assemblage of independent beings." Morphology, moreover, redirects biological inquiry from the question of new life (generation) around which the discipline had coalesced, to the biology and poetics of decomposition and senescence - or, as Goethe names one essay, "Going to Dust, Vapor, Droplets." What, this essay begins to ask, might life look like from the perspective of the non-reproductive, but communicative, effluvia that mediate between beings? What arts of discomposure would be adequate to this view? Focusing on an experiment in which a cut mushroom "draws" its own image in spores, I argue for the credibility in the period of non-human acts of representation: that is, for material (neo-Lucretian) images that emanate not just from agents, but from things.My second chapter, "Thinking Like an Object, Contra-Kant" concerns the aesthetic and poetic stakes of the experimental method Goethe calls "tender Empiricism," an approach to composite life that I read as a sly critique of Kant's durable accounts of aesthetics and organism. From Goethe's perspective, Kant's celebrated epistemological modesty - his concern that a man not "presumptuously ... tack a whim ... to the objects" (Goethe's paraphrase) - screens a more significant hubris: the presumption that a person could produce whims without objects and a sensing body; and, more basically, that what is important about a subject is the way in which he is not a natural object. Re- valuing the passive quality of tenderness as an epistemic virtue, Goethe experiments in "objectively active thinking," permitting the way the self is (also) an object to re-enter natural and aesthetic philosophy. The chapter culminates in a re-reading of the didactic poem Dauer im Wechsel ["Durance in Change"] from the perspective of objective figuration, centering on a neo-Lucretian simulacrum that, I argue, Paul de Man consequentially mistook for a symbol.In Chapter Three I move from Goethe's poetic morphology to Shelley's "poetry of life." "Growing Old Together: Composite Physiognomy in The Triumph of Life" examines the way Shelley's Triumph revives Lucretian corporeality in order to rebuke the markedly triumphalist rhetoric of both contemporary vitalist physiology and post-Waterloo historiography. Offering a new account of the face-giving trope of prosopopeia in the poem, I argue that Shelley mobilizes Lucretian simulacra in order to think through the way personal bodies produce and integrate passages of historical time. Representing aging faces as mutable registers of the "living air" of a post-Napoleonic interval, The Triumph depicts senescence as the unintended work of multitudes, pressing towards a biology and epistemology of transience that holds rhetorical, vital, and historical materialisms together.In Chapter Four, "The Natural History of Violence: Atomist Pre-Histories for Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy," I continue the increasingly historical trajectory of the dissertation's materialism by turning to Shelley's poetic representation of the 1819 "Peterloo Massacre." Here, I attempt to put the dissertation's valuation of epistemological "sweetness" and "tenderness" to the test of an event in which subjects' vulnerabilities were tragically violated. Focusing on the The Mask's preoccupation with the way wrongly spilled blood enters geological and meteorological cycles, I argue that the poem, which Shelley called "wholly political," is also a form of natural history. I recruit Erasmus Darwin, William Cowper, and James Thomson as well as Walter Benjamin to argue for a didactic natural historical mode in which a poem speaks polemically for bloodstained materials that do not, in themselves, disclose their provenance. In this way I suggest that, despite its reputation, pre-Darwinian natural history - and especially its poetry - is anything but a-historical or a-political. In the dissertation's Coda, "Marx's Sensuous Science" I pick up this materialist current at the start of the historical materialism more familiar to present-day critics: Karl Marx's doctoral dissertation on classical atomisms. I link Marx's reception of Lucretius to the idea of natural history that emerges in his "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844," which paraphrase Goethe on tender empiricism, and argue (like Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley) that any sensation-based science needs to countenance the senses' susceptibility to historical re-configuration. The Manuscripts strain, very much in the tradition my chapters lay out, towards what Marx calls a "sensuous science." Like Goethe and Shelley, Marx presses past the biology of organicism in order to adumbrate "man's inorganic body," a body neither contemporaneous nor coincident with itself and whose life is traversed by and contingent upon innumerable others. In the Coda I take this cue to compare Marxian and neo-Lucretian ideology critique, asking how the embodied impressionability valued in "tender," "sweet," and "sensuous" sciences may run, but may also outrun, the risk Marx named "reification."

Despite the fact that there seems to be no direct link between the works of Nikolai Gogol and those of Oscar Wilde, Gogol’s novella, Портрет (The Portrait) and Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, share many elements in common, most notably the device of the predatory portrait. This report explores the parallels that exist between these two texts and argues that they mutually derive from elements found in Goethe’s Faust and the trope of the literary vampire.

This dissertation examines Goethe’s portrayal of femininity in Die Wahlver-wandtschaften and how his depiction of all three central female characters relates to feminine ideals that were promoted through the theoretical gender debate of the late 1700s in Germany and Western Europe. I analyze Charlotte’s, Luciane’s, and Ottilie’s actions and interactions in various triadic character constellations in order to offer new insights into Goethe’s portrayal of femininity. In so doing, I argue that Goethe’s depiction of Charlotte holds the key to understanding how far Die Wahlverwandtschaften functions as (critical) commentary on the late Enlightenment gender discourse. I maintain that the actions and interactions of these three women show them as at times ‘unfit’ and/or unwilling to meet feminine ideals promoted in the late Enlightenment. I apply central concepts of Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory from the 1970s and 1980s as analytical tools to examine how far Goethe’s Wahlverwandt-schaften can be viewed as a critique of the norms and expectations commonly expressed in the late Enlightenment. I primarily focus on Kristeva’s concepts of subjectivity formation, semiotic and symbolic modalities, abjection, and her theorizing of motherhood. Kristeva’s emphasis on the pivotal role of the maternal function in the child’s identity formation and her representation of femininity as alterity allow me to explore the significance of Charlotte’s prevalence among the characters and to approach Goethe’s ambiguous and complex portrayal of unsteady, constantly shifting, and interrelated models of femininity in Charlotte, Luciane, and Ottilie as a narrative experiment in which he tests the viability of such models within the surrounding social discourse. In the main body of this dissertation, I begin by concentrating on Charlotte’s partnerships with men, and then I focus on her maternal role in relation to Luciane, Ottilie, and Otto. By making Charlotte the ‘epicenter’ of this investigation, I explore how far Goethe shapes her, Luciane, and Ottilie as characters who transgress late Enlightenment gender boundaries and thus deviate from what were considered ‘feminine ideals’ in order to underscore the arbitrary and contradictory nature of the prevalent social order.

This undergraduate thesis examines the philosophical intersections underpinning Schrödinger's understanding of quantum physics and Schoenberg's atonal compositional techniques through the focusing prism of Goethe's Faust. The analysis begins with an exposition of the basics of quantum mechanics, and progresses to the unifying concept of form Schrödinger derives from this framework. Following a similar overview of tonal and atonal composition theory, the similarities between Schoenberg's parallel concept of idea and Schrödinger's form are discussed. Both of these concepts are then examined through Goethe's Faust, with particular attention to the concept of "soul-form" by which Faust achieves ultimate salvation and fulfillment. Finally, these symmetric ideas are applied to a range of contemporary sociocultural issues.

This study is an investigation of the dramatic expression in thirty musical settings of Goethe's "Erlkonig," to attempt to determine why the works by Franz Schubert and Carl Loewe have achieved such popularity.

This thesis was written to examine Goethe's efforts to emulate the Greeks and write in their spirit. Works most helpful in the study were Humphry Trevelyan's Goethe and the Greeks, Kenry Hatfield's Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature, Eliza Butler's The Tyranny of Greece over Germany, and the works of Goethe which show his relationship with the Greeks.

The purpose of this thesis is to relate the six personalities dealt with by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Representative Men to such proportions of the essayist's ideas as may be applied to these six representative types, to the end of arriving at an understanding of Emerson's aim in writing about these six men and about great men in general.

Throughout the years the study of literary relationships has been a highly active form of research. There seems to be a perpetual interest in this field, with its matter of determining influences and comparing relationships and ideas. Certainly this is a logical interest. For on the assumption that literature is a search for truth, in what better way may we find that truth than through s study of the works of the world’s writers, searching for sources of their thoughts, and sharpening those thoughts through comparison and contest.Those Carlyle and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the authors under consideration here, have often been the subjects for this method of literary criticism. Much of this work has been done with the emphasis on influences, Indeed the influence of Goethe on Carlyle is now as widely recognized as any other like literary kinship, more so than most, perhaps, as the very vocal Scotchman was never one to hide his likes and dislikes in this world of man. The aspect of influence, however, is at best of an indirect importance to this thesis. The interest here is centered rather in the second kind of relationship, one in which ideas are dealt with irrespective of sources of origins. In general, this study is to be a comparison of some of the ideas of Carlyle and Goethe. More specifically, the problem is to discover just how the ideas of these two men are alike and how they vary, to what extent there is variation, and to find, if any, a common basis for the thinking of both authors. This research, in turn, will lead to the primary purpose of this thesis, that is, to see into the nature of Hebraism and Hellenism through the two works. Sartor Resartus and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.