The late 18th century is characterized by two crucial events: the rise of Goethe as a dominating literary figure and the emergence of Kant's critical philosophy and its productive reception not only in the philosophical but also literary discourse of the time. While the Tübingen School concreatively adopted Kant's philosophy as a system of ideas, they also critically responded to its intellectualising impulse by positing the equiprimordiality of world and Self, of art and reason. Adhering to the self-critical impulse of Kant's philosophy by positing the equiprimordiality of both the empirical world and the intelligible subject, and trying to overcome the "chorismos" between them through the classicist model of aesthetic Bildung, they argued for the co-extensiveness of the reality of both philosophy and literature. The authors investigate how the latent antagonism between these divergent traditions of the so-called Goethezeit creates the thrust behind the intellectual firework of divergent literary and philosophical discourses from around 1800, throughout the 19th and into the 20th century.

• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Goethe’s (Anti-)Classicism and Experientialism
• Embracing the Enemy: The Problem of Religion in Goethe’s “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul”
• “Meine Schwester Natalie ist hiervon ein lebhaftes Beispiel:” Bildung and Gender in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
• Mediating Subjectivities: Anti-Classical and Anti-Ideal Impulses in Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre and Die Wahlverwandtschaften
• Reading Surfaces: Goethe and Benjamin
• Kant-Critique and the Romanticist Movement
• Jakob Friedrich Fries as an Opponent of German Idealism
• Apparent Purposes. How Does the Purpose of Purposelessness Operate?
• Antecedents to Hegel’s Conception of Judaism in Kant’s Practical Philosophy
• “Diese Unwissenheit ist mir der unerträglichste Mangel, der gröste Widerspruch”: The Search for Pre-rational Knowledge in Karoline von Günderrode
• Romantic Anti-Idealism and Re-evaluations of Gender: Schlegel, Günderrode and Literary Gender Politics
• The Polymorphous Political Theology of Novalis and Marcuse
• Hölderlin and Nietzsche: The Ecological Complication of Idealist Aesthetics
• Hölderlin’s Poetics of Zärtlichkeit: The Corporeal Turn of Transcendental Idealism
• Grund/Abgrund. On Kant and Hölderlin
• Nietzsche and Cognitive Ecology
• Overturning Philosophy: Classic and (Anti)-Classic Considerations on Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo
• Index