Die Poesie der Klasse
Romantischer Antikapitalismus und die Erfindung des Proletariats
[The Poetry of Class: Romantic Anti-capitalism and the Invention of the Proletariat]
The triumph of industrial capitalism in the early 19th century lead to the emergence of a new social collective consisting of impoverished artisans, the urban rabble, vagrant peasants, bankrupt nobles, and not least the dismissed precarious intellectuals. In the language of the time, they would soon become known as the proletariat. At first, however, it did not exist as a fully formed, homogeneous class with representative political parties that claimed to lead the way towards a better future. The manifold appearance of these characters torn from any class-based securities, their dreams and desires found new narrative forms in romantic novels, reports, statistical analyses, and monthly bulletins. Soon, however, this variety of forms—as disorderly, violent, nostalgic, misleading, and utopian as they were—was denigrated by the labor movement’s pioneers as reactionary and anarchic as these forms did not fit into their grand vision of linear progress.
Patrick Eiden-Offe’s groundbreaking study recuperates the long-suppressed Romantic anti-capitalism and liberates the social and literary study of the 19th century from its one-dimensional proclivities. Eiden-Offe thereby determines that the historical, poetically extolled disorderly class features striking similarities to today’s precarious characters that followed the demise of the traditional labor movement.
1st place on the Philosophie-Magazin’s Fall 2017 best list.
Also available as a paperback edition Die Poesie der Klasse (2020) as part of the series “Batterien.”
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