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“Mines aren’t really like that”: German Romantic Undergrounds Revisited

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German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene

Part of the book series: Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment ((LCE))

Abstract

Drawing on contemporary reconceptualizations of materiality as a site of more-than-human mindfulness, meaning, and moral salience, this chapter brings a material ecocritical perspective to bear on the celebration of caverns, mines, and mining in Novalis’s unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen. While the German Romantic romance with mining has sometimes been seen as complicit with the emergent extractive economy of industrial modernity, I argue that it is also possible to exhume from Novalis’ literary underground an ecophilosophical ethos of human responsibility for more-than-human flourishing that answers to the socio-ecological exigencies of the present, in which “letting be” is no longer adequate.

I am grateful to the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies, where I completed this chapter, with financial support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bath Spa, Bath, UK

    Kate Rigby

Authors
  1. Kate Rigby
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Caroline Schaumann

  2. Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, USA

    Heather I. Sullivan

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Rigby, K. (2017). “Mines aren’t really like that”: German Romantic Undergrounds Revisited. In: Schaumann, C., Sullivan, H. (eds) German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54222-9_7

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