The Epic Imaginary
Description
This study analyzes how the imagination of the epic genre as legitimately legitimating community also unleashes an ambivalence between telling coherent - and hence legitimating - stories of political community and narrating open-ended stories of contingency that might de-legitimate political power. Manifest in eighteenth-century poetics above all in the disjunction between programmatic definitions of the epic and actual experiments with the genre, this ambivalence can also arise within a single epic over the course of its narrative. The present study thus traces how particular eighteenth-century epics explore an originary incompleteness of political power and its narrative legitimations. The first chapter sketches an overview of how eighteenth-century writers construct an imaginary epic genre that is assigned the task of performing the cultural work of legitimating political communities by narrating their allegedly unifying origins and borders. The subsequent chapters, however, explore how the practice of epic storytelling in works by Klopstock, Goethe, Wieland, and, in an epilogue, Brentano enact the disruptive potential of poetic language and narrative to question the legitimations of imaginary political origins and unities.
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Content
1.1 - The Imaginary [Seite 12]
1.2 - The Epic Imaginary and Literary History [Seite 15]
1.3 - Epic and Political Poetics [Seite 20]
2 - 1. The Epic Genre and the Question of Legitimacy in Eighteenth-Century Poetics [Seite 27]
2.1 - Legitimations I: Gottsched [Seite 27]
2.2 - Legitimations II: Bodmer and Breitinger [Seite 32]
2.3 - Blankenburg 1774: The Theory of the Novel [Seite 38]
2.4 - Blankenburg's Literarische Zusätze zu Johann Georg Sulzers Allgemeiner Theorie der Schönen Künste (1796-1798): »Der neuere Held« [Seite 41]
2.5 - Merck: Epic Naiveté [Seite 46]
2.6 - Herder: »Genealogie älterer Meister« [Seite 48]
3 - 2. The Epic Prosody of the Sublime Nation: Klopstock's Messias [Seite 54]
3.1 - The Mimesis of the Epic and Epic Mimesis: Klopstock's Theory of Hexameter as »Darstellung« [Seite 69]
3.2 - The High Priests of the Nation: Klopstock's Supplementary Epic Community [Seite 82]
4 - Excursus: The Passions of Klopstock and Badiou [Seite 88]
5 - 3. The Politics and Poetics of Epic World Citizenship in Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea [Seite 94]
5.1 - Figures of Character [Seite 99]
5.2 - The Laws of Epic Poetry [Seite 101]
6 - 4. Wieland's Parodic Humanism [Seite 125]
6.1 - Wieland's Parodic Humanism: Oberon in Context (Part I) [Seite 127]
6.2 - »Das Volk,« Cosmopolitanism, and Sovereignty in Wieland's Political Essays [Seite 139]
6.3 - Irregularity in Wieland's Humanism: Oberon Beyond Parody [Seite 150]
7 - Epilogue: Brentano's Romanzen vom Rosenkranz and the Romantic Epic [Seite 160]
7.1 - A. W. Schlegel's Anthropology of Poetry: Or, the Birth of Meter out of the Nature of Rhythm [Seite 163]
7.2 - Philological Legitimacy and the Invention of Romantic Epic [Seite 172]
7.3 - Romanzen vom Rosenkranz [Seite 183]
8 - Bibliography [Seite 205]
9 - Index of Subjects [Seite 217]
10 - Index of Names [Seite 222]
