>LITTERARIA PRAGENSIA 2026 (36) 71
ABSTRACT (en)
Borders imply a distinction between collective identity and collective difference. But attempts to draw borders – that is, to define the nature of what is contained within them, whether nations or historical periods or literary genres – often reveal their own inadequacy. For what they designate tends to be an abstraction, which cannot be fully reconciled with the complexity of an empirical reality in which the relationship between self and other, domestic and foreign, is not fixed but interactive. While citing various examples of this paradox, the article focuses on the German reception of Ossian and Shakespeare, by which both became generically national bards in the service of the cause of specifically German literary nationalism. In the ideologically overdetermined selective historicization of Shakespeare by J.G. Herder and A.W. Schlegel, in particular, we see the same tension between historical and normative criticism that has attended the conceptualization of Romanticism.
KEYWORDS (en)
romanticism, nationalism, borders, Ossian, Shakespeare reception, August Wilhelm Schlegel
DOI
https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2026.71.2
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Amoretti, Giovanni Vittorio. “Einleitung.” In August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, vii–lxxii. Bonn: Schroeder, 1923.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2006.
Berghahn, Klaus. “From Classicist to Classical Literary Criticism, 1730–1806.” In A History of German Literary Criticism, 1730–1980, edited by Peter Uwe Hohendahl, 29–38. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Bode, Christoph. “A Model of Models? Reconceptualizing European Romanticisms and the Form(s) of Historicity.” In Romantik erkennen – Modelle finden, edited by Stefan Matuschek and Sandra Kerschbaumer, 131–43. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2019.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Edited by James Boulton. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.
Chambers, Ephraim. Cyclopaedia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. London: James Knapton, 1728.
de Staël, Germaine. De l’Allemagne (1813). Edited by Simone Bayé. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.
Diderot, Denis, and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, eds. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. 28 vols. Paris and Neuchâtel: Briasson et al., 1751–72.
Diener, Alexander and Joshua Hagen. Borders: A Very Short Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
Duff, David, ed. The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Golburt, Olga. “Russian Empire and the Territories of Romanticism.” In The Cambridge History of European Romantic Literature, edited by Patrick Vincent, 574–609. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Gundolf, Friedrich. Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (1914). München: Köppers, 1959.
Halmi, Nicholas. “European Romanticism: Ambivalent Responses to the Sense of a New Epoch.” In The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought, edited by Warren Breckman and Peter Gordon, 1:40–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Herder, Johann Gottfried. Sämmtliche Werke. Edited by Bernhard Suphan. 33 vols. Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913.
Herder, Johann Gottfried. Werke in zehn Bänden. Edited by Ulrich Gaier et al. 10 vols. in 11. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2000.
Leerssen, Joep. “Ossian and the Rise of Literary Historicism.” In The Reception of Ossian in Europe, edited by Howard Gaskill, 110–25. London: Bloomsbury, 2008.
Lewis, Michael. The Politics of the German Gothic Revival: August Reichensperger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
Lovejoy, A.O. “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.” PMLA 39, no. 2 (1924): 229–53.
Migliorini, Bruno, and T. Gwynfor Griffith. The Italian Language. Rev. ed. London: Faber, 1984.
Oergel, Maike. Culture and Identity: Historicity in German Literature and Thought 1770–1815. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006.
Paulin, Roger. “Shakespeare and Germany.” In Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, 314–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Porter, Roy and Mikuláš Teich, eds. Romanticism in National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Saglia, Diego. I discorsi dell’esotico: L’oriente nel romanticismo britannico 1870–1830. Naples: Liguori, 2002.
Schlegel, August Wilhelm. Sämmtliche Werke. Edited by Eduard Böcking. 12 vols. Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846–47.
Schlegel, August Wilhelm. Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur, edited by Stefan Knödler. In Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen, Vol. 4, Part 1. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2018.
Schlegel, Friedrich. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Edited by Ernst Behler. 35 vols. to date. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958–.
Scott, Walter. “An Essay on the Drama.” In The Miscellaneous Prose Works, 6:219–395. Edinburgh: Cadell, 1834.
Tieck, Ludwig. “Die Anfänge des deutschen Theaters.” In Kritische Schriften, 1:323–88. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1848.
Trabant, Jürgen. “Herder and Language.” In A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, edited by Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke, 117–39. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009.
Trevor-Roper, Hugh. The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
UK Department of Education. News release, 27 November 2014, www.gov.uk/government/news/guidance-on-promoting-british-values-in-schools-published. Accessed 25 March 2025.
Vincent, Patrick, ed. The Cambridge History of European Romantic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Wellek, René. Concepts of Criticism. Edited by Stephen Nichols, Jr. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963.
Wellek, René. A History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950. 8 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955–92.
Wölfflin, Heinrich. Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwickelung in der neueren Kunst. München: Bruckmann, 1915.
