This study examines the ways in which memory is understood and aestheticized in Romantic texts, and argues that these works reveal serious doubt about the explanatory ability of the philosophical, psychological and aesthetic discourses against which modern thought is constructed.

The Jena Romantics represent the experience and presentation of memory as privileged and creative, but also as not always capable of giving reliable information about the actual past. But rather than depicting signifiers with no stable referents, their portrayal of memory and remembering as creative...