Description
Book SynopsisPresents a new theory of textual endings in eighteenth-century literature and thought. Analysing works by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist, Oliver Simons shows how the emergence of new kinds of literary endings around 1800 is inextricably linked to the history of philosophical and scientific concepts.
Trade Review“This is a well written and forcefully argued study that succeeds in bringing out an important and heretofore unrecognized curve of literary-historical development across what must be regarded as the most significant phase of German cultural history. Simons’s command of the scholarship is exemplary, combining close textual analysis with a broad view of literary and intellectual history. The book’s contribution to current discussions in the scholarship—about the historical study of form and the place of the history of knowledge in literary historical study—is substantial.” —David E. Wellbery, editor-in-chief of
A New History of German Literature“Simons operates on an elaborate and cutting-edge theoretical level. The readings in the book can be described as combining new formalist thinking with historical epistemology in the tradition of Foucault and the New Historicism. Simons’s book is innovative and exemplary at the same time, and this, in my view, is an enormous accomplishment.” —Rüdiger Campe, author of
The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist""This thought-provoking book greatly enriches our understanding of a key juncture in literary history by drawing attention to the ways in which literary genres, patterns of emplotment, and syntactical structures follow, critique, and complicate forms of reasoning in an age that glorifies reason and despairs of it in turn."" —Márton Dornbach, author of
The Saving Line: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Caesuras of Hope (Northwestern University Press, 2021)
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Thinking Through Conclusions
- 1. Lessing’s Form of Reason
- 2. Goethe and the Powers of Conclusion
- 3. Kleist’s Genres
- Literary Conclusions: From Urteilskraft to Schlusskraft
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
