Novalis: Philosophical, Literary, and Poetic Writings

Despite his short life, Friedrich von Hardenberg (otherwise known as Novalis, 1772-1801) was one of the most original and polymathic figures of the early Romantic movement in Germany. Novalis: Philosophical, Literary, and Poetic Writings assembles, for the first time in English, translations of Novalis’s published philosophical works, a large share of his surviving philosophical notes and fragments, his two unfinished novels (The Disciples at Saïs and Heinrich von Ofterdingen), and the Hymns to the Night.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Novalis not only theorized about art and its place in both the world of everyday human life and the universe of philosophical discourse but was himself a consummate artist in his own right. This unique edition of Novalis’s writings in English allows readers to track issues and themes throughout his short but productive career as a budding philosopher in the post-Kantian tradition, as a philosophical novelist, and as a poet of the first rank. Readers interested in Novalis’s views on philosophy, art, morality, politics, and religion, and how positions in each of these areas might be unified in single, overarching vision of reality, will find the present translation an essential guide.

James D. Reid is Professor of Philosophy at the Metropolitan State University of Denver. His research is interdisciplinary, drawing from philosophical, artistic, and scientific sources. His work is devoted to problems in axiology and the theory of meaning and the challenges of finding fitting ways of expressing the importance of what we care about. He has published widely on various philosophical issues in Kant and his successors in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is the recipient of two major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.