Women Writers’ Philosophy of Love in German Romanticism

Book excerpt: This monograph spotlights women writers’ contributions to the philosophy of German Romanticism. Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karoline von Günderrode, and Bettina Brentano von Arnim suggested a new vision for an emancipated community of women that develops through philosophical discourse of Progressive Universal Poetry. Their personal, fictionalized, and literary letters reinvent and retheorize the Romantic notions of sociability, symphilosophy, and sympoetry, as theorized by men, and retheorize the concepts of love. They provided a model for shaping intellectual and cultural life in the modern world while challenging rigid dichotomies of classs, gender, and ethnicity.