Locating the Romantic subject

Locating the Romantic Subject explores the analogical relationship between early German Romantic subjectivity and the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott's notion of the "intermediate area." Specifically, Gail Newman views Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801), the leading creative writer of early German Romanticism, through the lens of Winnicott's theories. Gail Newman's extensive introduction locates Novalis in the sociohistorical and philosophical context of the late eighteenth century, focusing on the theory of the subject that emerged at that time. She outlines the relationship of psychoanalytic and literary interpretation from the Freudian to the French to her own Winnicottian perspective. In the body of the text she provides a detailed and thorough analysis of Novalis's principal narrative text, the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1801). The volume concludes with an investigation of what happened to the Novalian "intermediate" subject in later Romantic texts. Newman asserts that the hovering motion that characterizes the Novalian and Winnicottian self dissolved into a tendency toward either an absolute fusion or irrevocable splitting of subject and object. By providing an extended application of a psychoanalytic theory that is beginning to be acknowledged as an important enhancement to the field of psychoanalysis and literature, this work makes a significant contribution to the literature on German Romanticism.