The absolute was one of the most significant philosophical concepts in the early nineteenth century, particularly for the German romantics. Its exact meaning and its role within philosophical romanticism remain, however, a highly contested topic among contemporary scholars.  In The Romantic Absolute, Dalia Nassar offers an illuminating new assessment of the romantics and their understanding of the absolute. In doing so, she fills an important gap...

"The great poet and polymath Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis, was long seen as representing a particular., brand of German Romanticism, embodying a predilection for the mystical and the irrational and a longing for death. Yet twentieth-century scholars debunked that myth and arrived at a view of the poet as one who produced a unified, precociously modern body of work in which human systems of individual and collective being as well as knowledge...