Memory in German Romanticism: Imagination, Image, Reception

Memory in German Romanticism treats memory as a core element in the production and reception of German art and literature of the Romantic era. The contributors explore the artistic expression of memory under the categories of imagination, image, and reception. Romantic literary aesthetics raises the subjective imagination to a level of primary importance for the creation of art. It goes beyond challenging reason and objectivity, two leading intellectual faculties of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and instead elevates subjective invention to form and sustain memory and imagination. Indeed, memory and imagination, both cognitive functions, seek to assemble the elements of one’s own experience, either directed toward the past (memory) or toward the future (imagination), coherently into a narrative. And like memories, images hold the potential to elicit charged emotional responses; those responses live on through time, becoming part of the spatial and temporal reception of the artist and their work. While imagination generates and images trigger and capture memories, reception creates a temporal-spatial context for art, organizing it and rendering it ＂memorable,＂ both for good and for bad. Thus, through the categories of imagination, image, and reception, this volume explores the phenomenon of German Romantic memory from different perspectives and in new contexts.

Christopher R. Clason is Professor Emeritus at Oakland University, with research interests in Medieval epic poetry (especially in Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan und Isolde) and German Romantic prose, particularly in the novels of E.T.A. Hoffmann. He is past president of the International Tristan Society and the International Conference on Romanticism.

Joseph D. Rockelmann is Teaching Assistant Professor of German at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with research interests in German Romanticism, Ludwig Tieck, and Ekphrasis studies. Publications include Ludwig Tieck’s Skillful Study of the Mind (2018), and ＂The Sociohistorical and Gendered Implications of Gazing Tenderly in Ludwig Tieck’s Liebeszauber＂ (2021).

Christina M. Weiler is Teaching Assistant Professor of German at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on German literature, culture, and philosophy of the long eighteenth century in a comparative and interdisciplinary framework, with a particular interest in metaphor, cognition, and environmental studies.