Jeffrey L. High & Rebecca Stewart 
Heinrich von Kleist 
Literary and Philosophical Paradigms

WINNER of the 2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award


Volume of new essays investigating Kleist’s influences and sources both literary and philosophical, their role as paradigms, and the ways in which he responded to and often shattered them.


Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) was a rebel who upset canonization by employing his predecessors and contemporaries as what Steven Howe calls ‘inspirational foils.’ It was precisely a keen awareness of literary and philosophical traditions that allowed Kleist to shatter prevailing paradigms. Though little is known about what specifically Kleist read, the frequent allusions in his enduringly modern oeuvre indicate fruitful dialogues with both canonical and marginal works of European literature, spanning antiquity (The Old Testament, Sophocles), the Early Modern Period (Shakespeare, De Zayas), the late Enlightenment (Wieland, Goethe, Schiller), and the first eleven years of the nineteenth century (Mereau, Brentano, Collin). Kleist’s works also evidence encounters with his philosophical precursors and contemporaries, including the ancient Greeks (Aristotle) and representatives of all phases of Enlightenment thought (Montesquieu, Rousseau, Ferguson, Spalding, Fichte, Kant, Hegel), economic theories (Smith, Kraus), and developments in anthropology, sociology, and law. This volume of new essays sheds light on Kleist’s relationship to his literary and philosophical influences and on their function as paradigms to which his writings respond.

Table of Content

Foreword: A Note on Kleist in American Art, Film, and Literature – Paul Michael Lützeler


Acknowledgments


Introduction: Kleist’s Literary and Philosophical Paradigms = Jeffrey L. High, Rebecca Stewart, and Elaine Chen


Part I. Kleist’s Literary Paradigms


In the Beginning: Kleist, Genesis, Kafka, and the Pursuit of Epistemological Salvation – Gail K. Hart


Just Violence? War, Law, and Politics in Kleist’s
Die Herrmannsschlacht and Shakespeare’s
Henry V – Steven Howe


The Mereau-Brentano Translations of María de Zayas’s ‘Spanish Novellas’ and Kleist’s Prose Works – Jeffrey L. High and Lisa Beesley


The Old and the New: Christoph Martin Wieland and Kleist on
Parteigeist – John A. Mc Carthy


Receptions, Homages, and Anti-Occupational Allegories of Autonomy: The Case of Schiller’s Bohemian Cup and Kleist’s Broken Jug – Jeffrey L. High and Elaine Chen


Anti-Napoleonic Rage and the Hope for a Better Future: Collin between Schiller and Kleist – Rebecca Stewart


Part II: Kleist’s Philosophical Paradigms


Fiat claritas et pereat opus: Equity and the Limits of Rectification in Kleist’s
Michael Kohlhaas – John T. Hamilton


Kleist, Johann Joachim Spalding and the
Bestimmung des Menschen: Philosophy as a Way of Life? – Laura Anna Macor


War Games: Kleist, Adam Ferguson, and the Cultural Poetics of Play – Christian Moser


Economic Concepts and Authorial Self-Design in Heinrich von Kleist’s Letters – Johannes Endres


Gender and the Politics of Recognition in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s
Foundations of Natural Right and Kleist’s
Amphitryon – Bernd Fischer


Kleist and Haiti – With and Beyond Hegel – Katrin Pahl


Notes on the Contributors


Index

About the author

KATRIN PAHL is Professor of German at the Johns Hopkins University, where she has also served as Co-Director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.