Dialectics of the Romantic Novel

Dialectics of the Romantic Novel argues for the centrality of dialectical thought to the emergence of the Romantic-era novel in Europe. In the aftermath of the French Revolution and amidst early rumors of the death of God, the genre’s unique capacity to present selves and worlds permeated with contradiction turned it into the arbiter of symbolic meaning in a culture increasingly resistant to singular authority. Novels by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean Paul, Friedrich Hölderlin, Mary Shelley, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe modeled a dialectical subjectivity in which the human being attains selfhood by being other to herself, making mediation necessary for selfhood to flourish. Tracing the emergence of a dialectical sensibility from Romantic novelists’ confrontation with both Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, this book challenges the tendency to identify “irony” as the key to the novel’s distinctness. The book makes a case, not for the self’s and novel’s openness or multiplicity or capacity for self-revision, but more specifically for their ability to embody contradiction. Mediating contradiction by the temporal, figurative, and architectonic means of novelistic narrative, the Romantic novel manifests a dialectical imagination, which posits that the dynamism of the subject resides in her self-alienation.