Abstract: Despite its widely acknowledged importance in and beyond the thought of the Romantic period, the distinctive concept of the symbol articulated by such writers as Goethe and F. W. J. Schelling in Germany and S. T. Coleridge in England has defied adequate historical explanation. This book provides an explanation by relating the content of Romantic symbolist theory — often criticized as irrationalist — to the cultural needs of its time. Because its genealogical method eschews a single disciplinary perspective, this book examines the Romantic concept of the symbol in a broader intellectual context than previous scholarship has done, a context ranging chronologically from classical antiquity to the present and encompassing literary criticism and theory, aesthetics, semiotics, theology, metaphysics, natural philosophy, astronomy, poetry, and the origins of landscape painting. The concept is thus revealed to be a specifically modern response to modern discontents, neither reverting to pre-modern modes of thought nor secularizing Christian theology, but countering Enlightenment dualisms with means bequeathed by the Enlightenment itself.

Keywords: Goethe, F. W. J. Schelling, S. T. Coleridge, symbol, Romantic symbolist theory, irrationalist, literary criticism, modern discontents, Enlightenment