Dialectics of the Romantic Novel: Self-Estrangement, Mediation, and Narrative Form

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Dialectics of the Romantic Novel argues for the centrality of dialectical thought to the emergence of the Romantic-era novel in Europe. In the aftermath of the French Revolution and amidst early rumors of the death of God, the genre's unique capacity to present selves and worlds permeated with contradiction turned it into the arbiter of symbolic meaning in a culture increasingly resistant to singular authority. Novels by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean Paul, Friedrich H