Main entry:

Engell, James, 1951- author.

Title & Author:

The creative imagination : Enlightenment to Romanticism / James Engell.

Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 1981.

Description:

xix, 416 pages ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 369-379) and index.
pt. 1. Probing the source: The essential idea -- Empiricism in earnest: Hobbes and Locke -- Claims of the spirit: Shaftesbury and Leibniz -- The creative impulse: Addison through Akenside and the 1740s -- The inner structure of life: Hume and Johnson -- pt. 2. A broader stage: New aesthetics and criticism: the Associationists and the Scots -- Investigators of genius: Gerard and Duff -- pt. 3. The German foundation: Shadows a century long -- The new focus of literature and myth -- The great metamorphosis: Tetens and Kant -- pt. 4. The psyche reaches out: sympathy -- The psyche reaches out: coalescence and the chemistry of the mind -- Distinctions between fancy and imagination -- A plateau in Britain and developments in America -- Organic sensibility: Hazlitt -- pt. 5. Literary explorations: The new philosopher's stone and the new Pierian spring -- The prophetic and visionary: Blake and Shelley -- Wordsworth -- Goethe and Keats -- pt. 6. Harmony of being: Schelling -- Coleridge.

Summary:

"In a work of astonishing intellectual range, James Engell traces the evolution of the creative imagination, from its emergence in British empirical thought through its flowering in Romantic art and literature. The notion of a creative imagination, Engell shows, was the most powerful and important development of the eighteenth century. It grew simultaneously in literature, criticism, philosophy, psychology, religion, and science, attracting such diverse minds as Hobbes, Addison, Gerard, Goethe, Kant, and Coleridge. Indeed, rather than discussing merely the abstract notion of the imagination, Engell examines the community of thinkers, especially in England and Germany, who joined to pursue and develop what became the most fascinating and suggestive concept of modern Western thought. For as the imagination became the dominant subject of literature, its meaning multiplied. Finally it came to be seen as the crown of artistic creation and as the mediator in the ongoing dialectic between matter and spirit, materialism and transcendentalism. In his examination of a living and evolving community of mind and sensibility, Engell discusses scores of major figures, from Locke and Johnson, through Blake and Schiller, to Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth. And by focusing on the growth of one central concept, he portrays the intellectual life of an entire period. Vast in scope, yet deeply analytical, his work is a distinguished achievement in the history of ideas." -- Book jacket.

Resources:
Table of contents
Table of contents
Table of contents
Table of contents
French equivalent / Équivalent français

ISBN:

0674175727
9780674175723

Subject:

Deutsch
Imagination Musikgruppe : London
BMBF-Statusseminar
Imagination History.
Enlightenment.
Romanticism Great Britain.
Romanticism Germany.
Empiricism History.
Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)
Enlightenment History.
Empiricism history
Imagination history
Creativity history
Imagination Histoire.
Siècle des Lumières Histoire.
Romantisme Grande-Bretagne.
Romantisme Allemagne.
Empirisme Histoire.
Création littéraire.
Siècle des Lumières.
Enlightenment (18th-century western movement)
Empiricism
Imagination
Romanticism
Englisch
Literatur
Romantik
Theorie
Creativiteit.
Verbeelding.
Verbeeldingskracht.
Verlichting (cultuurgeschiedenis)
Romantiek.
Germany
Great Britain
Großbritannien
Imagination Theories of Western European writers 1700-1850.

Form/genre:

History.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 75647
Call No.: PO4607; ID:86-B13331
Status: Available