Novalis: Philosophical, Literary, and Poetic Writings

Despite his short life, Friedrich von Hardenberg (otherwise known as Novalis, 1772-1801) was one of the most original and polymathic figures of the early Romantic movement in Germany. Novalis: Philosophical, Literary, and Poetic Writings assembles, for the first time in English, translations of Novalis's published philosophical works, a large share of his surviving philosophical notes and fragments, his two unfinished novels (The Disciples at Saïs and Heinrich von Ofterdingen), and the Hymns to the Night. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Novalis not only theorized about art and its place in both the world of everyday human life and the universe of philosophical discourse but was himself a consummate artist in his own right. This unique edition of Novalis's writings in English allows readers to track issues and themes throughout his short but productive career as a budding philosopher in the post-Kantian tradition, as a philosophical novelist, and as a poet of the first rank. Readers interested in Novalis's views on philosophy, art, morality, politics, and religion, and how positions in each of these areas might be unified in single, overarching vision of reality, will find the present translation an essential guide.