Notes for a romantic encyclopaedia - Novalis

The first English translation of Novalis's unfinished notes for a universal science, Das Allgemeine Brouillon.

Novalis (1772-1801) was the foremost poet-philosopher of early German Romanticism. Universally acclaimed as a poetic genius for such works as Hymns to the Night and the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, he especially favored the fragment form for his philosophical meditations. The latter reach their climax in this volume, his astonishing plan for a universal science. David W. Wood is a PhD candidate in German Idealism at the Sorbonne in Paris. He is the translator of Goethe and Love by Karl Julius Schrer.

"…a welcome contribution to the growing literature in English on the philosophy of the early German romantics … This book deserves to be read not simply for its many poetic moments … but for the overall vision that gives the poetry its theoretical punch." - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"With its lucid introduction and notes, this essential volume enables the English-speaking reader to approach the Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia (1798-9) for the first time as a coherent text, part of a wider search in Germany for a new scientific method, a plan only later realized in modern physics." - The Times Literary Supplement

"…expertly translated, edited, and introduced by David W. Wood ... There seems to be no topic, from the mysteries of the skin to the properties of minerals, which Novalis's encyclopedic ambition failed to confront." - The New York Sun

"Wood's translation will radically change our sense of the range and shape of 'philosophy' in German Idealism and Romanticism, and will make a major contribution to our understanding of the stakes and divisions in the encyclopaedic project from the Enlightenment to the present." - Tilottama Rajan, author of Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard

"Wood's excellent translation of a difficult text is of the highest quality and will be of great service to the field." - Elizabeth Milln-Zaibert, translator of Manfred Frank's The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism