Martin Reulecke’s 2010 Annotated Bibliography and History of Reception

Among the many gifts so generously attested in her letters, Caroline Schelling’s adroit rhetorical talent for irony and wit is particularly striking. It was admired not only during her own lifetime, but also after the historian Georg Waitz published a large number of her letters in 1871.

What has long been forgotten, however, is that the initial publication of these letters generated a spontaneous, broad, diverse, and extremely passionate response, one that in its own turn crucially influenced the subsequent reception of her correspondence and personality.

Taking this situation as its point of departure, this study fills two gaps. On the one hand, it presents the first essentially complete bibliography of one of the central figures of early German Romanticism. On the other, its examination of the history of reception and of all the relevant literature illuminates how the impact of these letters has been intimately connected with the resulting assessments of Caroline Schelling herself over the years.

A nuanced and thorough examination of the history of reception and scholarship from the earliest publications to the present, and an exhaustive bibliography.

The book is available as volume 49 of the publications of the Stiftung für Romantikforschung from the Verlag Königshausen & Neumann.

Martin Reulecke studied law in Göttingen and Bayreuth and earned his PhD in 2007 with a dissertation on the philosophical underpinnings of the notion of equality before the law in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Germany. He lives in Hamburg, where he works at the Hamburg State Opera.

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