Feeling and Classical Philology Knowing Antiquity in German Scholarship, 1770–1920

Nineteenth-century German classical philology underpins many structures of the modern humanities. In this book, Constanze Güthenke shows how a language of love and a longing for closeness with a personified antiquity have lastingly shaped modern professional reading habits, notions of biography, and the self-image of scholars and teachers. She argues that a discourse of love was instrumental in expressing the challenges of specialisation and individual formation (Bildung), and in particular for the key importance of a Platonic scene of learning and instruction for imagining the modern scholar. The book is based on detailed readings of programmatic texts from, among others, Wolf, Schleiermacher, Boeckh, Thiersch, Dilthey, Wilamowitz and Nietzsche. It makes a case for revising established narratives, but also for finding new value in imagining distance and an absence of nostalgic longing for antiquity.

Introduction: feeling and philology; 1. The potter's daughter: longing, Bildung, and the self; 2. From the symposium to the seminar: language of love and language of institutions; 3. 'So that he unknowingly and delicately mirrors himself in front of us, as the beautiful often do': Schleiermacher's Plato; 4. 'Enthusiasm dwells only in one-sidedness': knowledge of antiquity and professional philology; 5. 'The most instructive form in which we encounter an understanding of life': the age of biography; 6. The life of the Centaur: Wilamowitz, biography, Nietzsche; Epilogue: on keeping a distance.

Constanze Güthenke is Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Oxford and E. P. Warren Praelector in Classics at Corpus Christi College. Her main research interests lie in the field of antiquity after antiquity, and in questions of the disciplinary shape of Classics and the history of scholarship. Her publications include Placing Modern Greece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism (2008). She is a founding member of the Postclassicisms collective and she is currently editor-in-chief of the Classical Receptions Journal.