The power of poetry, a topos since Plato, undergoes a radical transformation in literary texts between 1770 and 1830. Concepts of divine or unconscious inspiration or of the overwhelming impacts of poetry are recast in notions of the transformative potentials of poetry. The author discusses these reconfigurations of poetic power in the context of early thermodynamic thinking, where the world presents itself not as a mechanism but as a self-organised metabolism. In images of nature as well as in machine-like arrangements for burning and consuming, breathing and eating, Goethe and Novalis develop models of a formal dynamic that, along with Herder and W. v. Humboldt, can be understood asenergeia, i.e., as continuous shaping and reshaping.

Rewrites the long history of force in natural philosophy and poetics of the 17th and 18th centuries

Takes up current initiatives of energy studies

Goethe and Novalis as observers of the entry into fossil combustion cultures

Cornelia Zumbusch, *1972 Kabul, seit 2013 Prof.in für Neuere Deutsche Literatur, Universität Hamburg, mit Schwerpunkt auf Literatur des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, seit 2015 Codirektorin Warburg-Haus Hamburg, seit 2019 Sprecherin DFG-Kollegforschungsgruppe "Imaginarien der Kraft"; Forschungsschwerpunkte sind neben Problemen der Poetik und Genese literarischer Formen Fragen der Bild- und Kulturwissenschaft um und nach 1900