The Poetry of Class: Romantic Anti-Capitalism and the Invention of the Proletariat: 305 (Historical Materialism Book Series, 305)

Patrick Eiden-Offe, Jacob Blumenfeld

ISBN 10: 9004685456 / ISBN 13: 9789004685451

Published by Brill, 2023

About this Item

Seller Inventory # LU-9789004685451

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Poetry of Class: Romantic Anti-Capitalism and the Invention of the Proletariat: 305 (Historical Materialism Book Series, 305)
• Publisher: Brill
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9004685456
• ISBN 13: 9789004685451
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Dimensions: 15.5W x 2.6H x 23.5D centimeters 15.5 centimeters width by 2.6 centimeters height by 23.5 centimeters depth
• Weight: 590 grams

About this title

Synopsis

In the early 19th century, a new social collective emerged out of impoverished artisans, urban rabble, wandering rural lower classes, bankrupt aristocrats and precarious intellectuals, one that would soon be called the proletariat. But this did not yet exist as a unified, homogeneous class with affiliated political parties. The motley appearance, the dreams and longings of these figures, torn from all economic certainties, found new forms of narration in romantic novellas, reportages, social-statistical studies, and monthly bulletins. But soon enough, these disorderly, violent, nostalgic, errant, and utopian figures were denigrated as reactionary and anarchic by the heads of the labour movement, since they did not fit into their grand linear vision of progress. In this book, Patrick Eiden-Offe tells their story, tracing the making of the proletariat in Vörmarz Germany (1815–1848) through the writings of figures like Ludwig Tieck, Moses Hess, Wilhelm Weitling, Georg Weerth, Friedrich Engels, Louise Otto-Peters, Ernst Willkomm, and Georg Büchner, and in so doing, revealing a striking similarity to the disorderly classes of today.

About the Author

Patrick Eiden-Offe, Ph.D. (1971), is a permanent research associate at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin. He has published three books in German, Das Reich der Demokratie. Hermann Brochs “Der Tod des Vergil” (Fink, 2011), Die Poesie der Klasse (Matthes & Seitz, 2017) and Hegels Logik Lesen (Matthes & Seitz, 2021), and is currently writing an intellectual biography of Georg Lukács.