For many eighteenth-century European philosophers and writers, the "beautiful soul" was a symbol of enlightened humanity, carrying with it the possibility that aesthetic beauty and moral goodness would be fused in a new, indivisible unity. In the first book in English on the subject, Robert E. Norton follows the fortunes of this cultural icon, exploring the reasons for both its initial popularity and its subsequent decline as a cultural ideal during the Enlightenment.

The works of Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, 1763-1825) combined the idealism of Fichte with the sentimentality of the Sturm und Drang movement. In this study the relation between Jean Paul and 18th-century philosophy is described as dialogical in the sense that the author's statements concerning aesthetics, ethics, and religion take the form of appeals and responses to other philosophical texts. Three of his novels, Unsichtbare Loge, Hesperus, and Titan, are involved not only with the representation of quasi-fictive worlds, (...) but also with the ironic reinscription of philosophemes from such sources as Herder, Jacobi, Platner, and Fichte. This inquiry into Jean Paul's «Seelen-Mythologie» and its problematic depiction of symbolic individuals takes into account the theory of the sublime and the «beautiful soul» which emerged during the enlightenment. (shrink)

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit has attracted much attention recently from philosophers, but none of the existing English-language books on the text addresses one of the most difficult questions the book raises: Why does the Phenomenology make such rich and provocative use of literary works and genres? Allen Speight's bold contribution to the debate on the work of Hegel argues that behind Hegel's extraordinary appeal to literature in the Phenomenology lies a philosophical project concerned with understanding human agency in the modern (...) world. It shows that Hegel looked to three literary genres - tragedy, comedy, and the Romantic novel - as offering privileged access to three moments of human agency: retrospectivity, theatricality, and forgiveness. Taking full account of the authors whom Hegel himself refers to, Allen Speight has written a book with a broad appeal to both philosophers and literary theorists. (shrink)