German Romanticism and Science: The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter

In Holland’s study, procreation serves as the discursive site to revisit the ever-contentious relation between literature and science and analyze their interaction. Holland argues that procreation lies at the heart of scientific and literary interdisciplinarity during the Romantic period, since the boundaries between literature and science were more porous than they are today, on the one hand, and the meaning of procreation was not limited to a narrow physiological discussion, but extended to all processes of generation, on the other.