Navigation überspringen.
Startseite

Indo-German Identification

Cowan, Robert:
The Indo-German identification : reconciling South Asian origins and European destinies, 1765-1885 / Robert Cowan. - Rochester, N.Y. : Camden House, 2010. - x, 225 S. - (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture)
Hochschulschrift. Teilw. zugl.: New York, CUNY Graduate Center, Diss., 2006 unter dem Titel: The Indo-Germans : an Aryan romance
ISBN 978-1-57113-463-9 / 1-57113-463-8
£ 40,00 / US$ 75,00
DDC: 303.48243054
-- Angekündigt für September 2010 --

Beschreibung
In the early nineteenth century, German intellectuals such as Novalis, Schelling, and Friedrich Schlegel, convinced that Germany's cultural origins lay in ancient India, attempted to reconcile these origins with their imagined destiny as saviors of a degenerate Europe, then shifted from "Indomania" to Indophobia when the attempt foundered. The philosophers Hegel, Schopenhauer, and, later, Nietzsche provided alternate views of the role of India in world history that would be disastrously misappropriated in the twentieth century.
   Reconstructing Hellenistic and humanist views of the ancient Brahmins and Goths, French-Enlightenment debates over the postdiluvian origins of the arts and sciences, and the Indophilia and protonationalism of Herder, Robert Cowan focuses on turning points in the development of an "Indo-German" ideal, an ideal less focused on intellectual imperialism than many studies of the "Aryan Myth" and Orientalism would have us believe. Cowan argues that the study of this ideal continues to offer lessons about cultural difference in the "post-national" twenty-first century.
   Of great interest to historians, philosophers, and literary scholars, this cross-cultural study offers a new understanding of the Indo-German story by showing that attempts to establish identity necessarily involve a reconciliation of origins and destinies, of self and other, of individual and collective. [Verlagsinformation]

Inhalt
1. Introduction: History Is Personal
2. Prologue: Original Attributes, 425 B.C.-A.D. 1765
3. As Flood Waters Receded: The Enlightenment on the Indian Origins of the Arts and Sciences
4. Seeds of Romantic Indology: From Language to Nation
5. Hindu Predecessors of Christ: Novalis's Shakuntala
6. Reconcilable Indifferences: Schelling and the Gitagovinda
7. Fear of Infinity: Friedrich Schlegel's Indictment of Indian Religion
8. Hegel's Critique of "Those Plant-like Beings"
9. Schopenhauer's Justification for Good
10. Nietzsche's Inability to Escape from Schopenhauer's South Asian Sources
11. Epilogue: Destinies Reconsidered, 1885-2004
12. Conclusion: The Intersection of the Personal, the Philosophical, and the Political
13. Bibliography
14. Index

Autor
ROBERT COWAN is Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York.

Quellen: Camden House; Library of Congress; WorldCat; Amazon