Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon (Suny Series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory) [Hardcover]

Novalis (Author), David W. Wood (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0791469735 | ISBN-13: 978-0791469736 | Publication Date: February 2007

The first English translation of Novalis's unfinished notes for a universal science, Das Allgemeine Brouillon.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Novalis is best known in history as the poet of early German Romanticism. However, this translation of Das Allgemeine Brouillon, or "Universal Notebook," finally introduces him to the English-speaking world as an extraordinarily gifted philosopher in his own right and shatters the myth of him as a mere daydreaming and irrational poet. Composed of more than 1,100 notebook entries, this is easily Novalis's largest theoretical work and certainly one of the most remarkable and audacious undertakings of the "Golden Age" of German philosophy. In it, Novalis reflects on numerous aspects of human culture, including philosophy, poetry, the natural sciences, the fine arts, mathematics, mineralogy, history, and religion, and brings them all together into what he calls a "Romantic Encyclopaedia" or "Scientific Bible."

Novalis's Romantic Encyclopaedia fully embodies the author's own personal brand of philosophy, "Magical Idealism." With meditations on mankind and nature, the possible future development of our faculties of reason, imagination, and the senses, and the unification of the different sciences, these notes contain a veritable treasure trove of richly poetic and philosophic thoughts.

"Wood's translation will radically change our sense of the range and shape of `philosophy' in German Idealism and Romanticism, and will make a major contribution to our understanding of the stakes and divisions in the encyclopaedic project from the Enlightenment to the present." -- Tilottama Rajan, author of Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard

"Wood's excellent translation of a difficult text is of the highest quality and will be of great service to the field." -- Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, translator of Manfred Frank's The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism

About the Author

Novalis (1772-1801) was the foremost poet-philosopher of early German Romanticism. Universally acclaimed as a poetic genius for such works as Hymns to the Night and the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, he especially favored the fragment form for his philosophical meditations. The latter reach their climax in this volume, his astonishing plan for a universal science. David W. Wood is a PhD candidate in German Idealism at the Sorbonne in Paris. He is the translator of Goethe and Love by Karl Julius Schröer.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 290 pages
• Publisher: State University of New York Press (February 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791469735
• ISBN-13: 978-0791469736
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,633,640 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Infinitely Complex and Mystifying, May 7, 2010

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Mr. Steiner (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon (Suny Series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory) (Hardcover)

The Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia remains one of the great-unstudied and under appreciated texts of the Romantic period. Novalis attempted to extend mathematical potentiation to all domains of knowledge-to 'raise them to a higher power' in order to unify them and understand their intrinsic relatedness. This is one of the great synthesizing texts in the philosophical tradition. The entries in this volume cover an absurd range of disciplines, from chemistry and mineralogy to poetry. It is impossible to fully understand this incomplete and highly fragmented work, but it is nevertheless entirely necessary in order to grasp what the project of German Romanticism actually was.