Sympathy in Transformation

Download or read book Sympathy in Transformation written by Roman Alexander Barton and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is little doubt that sympathy plays a pivotal role in aesthetic as well as moral experience, yet also little agreement on how to describe this connection and its long history. This volume investigates the changes in the concept of sympathy as well as its rhetorical, poetical and ethical functions from antiquity to the threshold of Romanticism. The focus is on sympathy's development from a cosmological principle expressing the coherence, correspondence, and unity of all things into a theoretical key concept of intersubjectivity informing moral philosophy, criticism and literature. Thus, Sympathy in Transformation offers important insights into the many ways in which, when sympathy migrates into diverse discourses in Early Modernity, its ancient origins dwindle out of sight, while some of its central elements re-emerge in a surprising manner.