Late Enlightenment (literature)

The Late Enlightenment is an epoch of German literature that spans roughly the last third of the 18th century and extends into the first third of the 19th century.

Problems of literary epochs

For the course of the 18th century, the classification and the sequence of the literary epochs became increasingly problematic. It is important to always remember that the authors, who today are often assigned to one or the other epoch, only rarely felt themselves to be representatives of a certain direction, and that corresponding epoch terms usually only later on from literary studies were introduced, whereby literary scholars often assign individual authors to different literary epochs in different phases of their work or in conflicting evaluations. Even with later authors such as Georg Büchner , some of whom can already be assigned to Young Germany , the political and aesthetic influences of the Enlightenment can still be clearly demonstrated, while for example various works by Wieland rightly from the Early Enlightenment , the Rococo , the Classical and can be assigned to the late reconnaissance.

definition

Assuming this, it can still be said that the late Enlightenment phase describes those authors, or their works, who emerged parallel to and after the beginning of the early Romantic period - known in Germany as Sturm und Drang - and in which philosophical positions and aesthetic forms of the Enlightenment continued beyond the time of the French Revolution and into the beginning of Romanticism .

Here, too, caution is advised, since later (occasionally simultaneous) authors sometimes schematically disqualified colleagues who represented enlightenment positions, for example as Philistines who stubbornly and academically clung to purely rational systems and in the process stifled every feeling, every genius. However, this polemical escalation in the sense of a battle term has little in common with the reality of the literary scene of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in general and in all its contradictions, since a characteristic of the Enlightenment was precisely subjective sensitivity , often of a pietistic nature which was also based on English models such as Laurence Sterne (see e.g. Nicolais The Life and Opinions of Herr Magister Sebaldus Nothanker ), but at the same time adhered to humanistic , rational, supra-personal principles. This becomes particularly clear when one considers that essential forms of enlightenment literature rely on subjective art forms such as the letter novel , the travelogue and the diary .

Literary forms

The Late Enlightenment knows many literary forms. In contrast to Sturm und Drang and Romanticism, there are almost no dramas , no historical, medieval material , hardly any fairy tales , no verses and no fragments , but often novels - often based on the English model - as well as aphorisms , travel books , autobiographies , political essays and poems .

Late Enlightenment authors

(Several of the following authors are also assigned to other literary epochs, while some figures missing here, for example Jean Paul , could also be listed here for certain parts of their work. For the problem of the concept of epoch, see the first paragraph of this article).

literature

Wolfgang Albrecht: The pleasant and the useful. Case studies on the late literary enlightenment in Germany. Tübingen 1997. In: Wolfenbütteler Studies for Enlightenment 23
Monika Ammermann: Common life. Changed concept of nature and late literary enlightenment. Lichtenberg, Wezel , Garve, Bonn 1978
Sybille Gössl: Materialism and Nihilism. Studies on the German novel of the Late Enlightenment , Königshausen and Neumann, 1986
Dieter Kimpel, Conrad Wiedemann (ed.): Theory and technology of the novel in the 17th and 18th centuries. Volume II. Late Enlightenment, Classical and Early Romanticism , Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1970
Urs Meyer: Political Rhetoric. Theory, analysis and history of rhetoric using the example of the late Enlightenment scientist Johann Gottfried Seume , Paderborn, Mentis, 2001
Hans Joachim Piechotta (Ed.): Travel and Utopia. On the literature of the late Enlightenment , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1976
Harro Segeberg: The Late Enlightenment. In: V. Zmegac (Ed.): History of German Literature I / 1 (1978), pp. 349-413, 3rd edition 1992
Inge Stephan: Johann Gottfried Seume: a political writer of the German Late Enlightenment , Stuttgart, Metzler, 1973

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