Epistemology, Imagination, and History in Romantic Realism

The short, enigmatic aphorism "Keine Poesie, keine Wirklichkeit" (Schleiermacher) best describes the romantic idea of poetic realism. Rather than approaching the problem of realism as a matter of representation of an objectively given world, the Romantics focused on the inextricable link between subject and world that are both in a mutually constitutive relationship. Realism, thus, describes an epistemological perspective in poetry rather than a particular style of mimetic representation. By taking a close look at theoretical writings by Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel as well as Novalis, and poetic texts by Tieck and Arnim, this article explores romantic notions of poetic realism, without pitting the subjectivist tendency of Romanticism against what in the later nineteenth century came to be called 'Realism: I demonstrate that romantic realism is based on a rejection of both the strict distinction between subject and object in German idealism on the one hand, and the teleological aspect in Schiller's project of aesthetic education on the other. Romanticism insists on the decisive function of imagination for the constitution of reality and simultaneously recognizes the existence of a resistive and irreducible outside world. Thus, romantic realism embraces the 'characteristic' as an index of reality's manifoldness.