Hybrid Hymns

This chapter uncovers the multilingual aspects of the literary genre of the British hymn by looking at the surprisingly polyglot, Anglo-German influences on its formation and their impact during the eighteenth century. Once we read across languages, we realize that a great part of what we think of as typically British hymns are, in fact, translations from the German, composed by the Moravians. Many of their hymns are exorbitant in their use of erotic Christianity, a topic that is also important to Blake and Hamann. The hymn is a hybrid, something that is reflected directly in the bilingual hymnbooks, so far neglected by scholarship. The chapter provides a fresh reading of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience across languages that attends to these multilingual and comparative echoes that have not been noticed before.

The Polyglot Moravians in Eighteenth-Century London

This chapter turns the book’s attention from individuals to institutions, specifically the congregation of the Moravian Church in London. The Moravians came to London from Germany and were an idiosyncratic, exorbitant nonconformist group who had considerable influence, even though it never sought to be at the centre. They remain relatively unknown in literary studies, despite their central role in the formation of Methodism and beyond. As the chapter’s discussion of previously unpublished materials from the extensive Moravian Archive in London reveals, the Moravians were a unique hub for Anglo-German thinking, language acquisition, and bilingual book-printing in eighteenth-century London. In particular, their investment in an aesthetic of the quotidian makes their direct links to Blake and Hamann (Blake’s mother was a Moravian, Hamann visited the London congregation) deeply relevant for the account of the period.

Introduction

The Introduction to the book lays out the aims of the project, formulates its major contributions, and explains its structure. It introduces the category of the ‘exorbitant’ as an important new way of a multilingual way of studying the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries allows us to reconceptualize the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and modernity. It also discusses why the book chapters function as ‘constellations’, rather than sequentially, a methodological background that is inspired by Walter Benjamin. This chapter gives two concentrated examples of the main contributions of the book. It shows the need for our recovery of a rich yet unknown Anglo-German context in pre-1790 Britain by offering a new reading of Robinson Crusoe in this light (Crusoe’s original name is ‘Kreutznaer’; he is a second-generation German immigrant). Correspondingly, it introduces some of the main historical and theoretical affinities between William Blake and Johann Georg Hamann.

Every Letter Has a Body

In this chapter the discussion turns to Blake’s and Hamann’s understanding of the inextricable link between language and sexuality. Both Blake and Hamann believed that language is always bodily and physical. Since the most direct way to describe the body is through its sexuality, they argue that language is also ultimately sexual. Other than most Christian thinkers, Blake and Hamann both believe that this sexual aspect is something to be celebrated, and any attempt to purify language from its corporeality is misguided. Language, down to particular letters, turns out to be the locale where the physical and the metaphysical ultimately intersect. This chapter provides comparative readings across their works, and a detailed reading of Hamann’s New Apology of the Letter h. Taken together, these readings situate the two authors as new, critical voices in the study of sexuality and language in eighteenth-century thinking and writing.

A Critique of Habit

This chapter shows how Blake and Hamann connect their exorbitant critique of conventional thinking and its deadening force with their sharp analysis of institutional religion, matrimony, and pedagogy. As deeply spiritual writers, they are particularly appalled with their historical moment and the position institutional religion has assumed as a form of organization and disciplining that perverts creativity and freedom. Remarkably, one of their common examples for such a negative development is the sacrament of marriage, which they see stripped of all its original meaning. Similarly, they produce an account which makes clear how pedagogy in the eighteenth century (and beyond) is being used to close off the real and affective dimensions of spirituality, ensuring conventional thinking. The way in which these thinkers translate such insights into their own lives forms the central discussion of this chapter, giving the reader a good sense of their biographical circumstances and their exorbitant arguments.

Blake and Hamann

This chapter contextualizes Blake’s and Hamann’s radical propositions about language and reason. For them, language is both ‘the mother of reason and revelation’ but ‘also the centre point of the misunderstanding of reason with itself’. In contrast to the emerging Lockean philosophical status quo of the times, they reject any functional account of language, and instead argue that poetry lies at the origin of all creative thinking (‘poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race’). Blake and Hamann create an account of language (the ‘uterus of thought’) that presents poetic expression as the most concentrated and truthful way of generating meaning, not just in the past, but also today. Crucially, for Blake and Hamann, language and reason are inextricably connected, suggesting that thinking itself is poetical. In their exorbitant epistemology and ontology, Blake and Hamann emerge as two major critics of the eighteenth-century linguistic thinking and philosophy.

Crossing Channels

This chapter focuses on three key intellectuals of the Anglo-German exchange of ideas in the eighteenth century: Henry Fuseli, Georg Hamann, and Caspar Lavater. Henry Fuseli, the chapter shows, is not only the painter of English Gothic Romanticism but also one of the most important textual authors and translators in 1760s Enlightenment London. The second example, Hamann, appears as one of the main figures from the Anglo-German exchange of ideas who is relevant far beyond our current appreciation. The chapter closes by discussing Lavater’s role in the Anglo-German context. What it illustrates is how he not only connects Blake and Hamann in this historical way, but also through his neglected writings on language, which reveal a thinker whose ideas on the book of nature are remarkably close to Blake’s and Hamann’s. The multiple connections between Fuseli, Hamann, and Lavater, then, reveal the complexity and richness of the Anglo-German context in the eighteenth century.

Blake and Hamann

Out of the Anglo-German context, the previous chapter uncovered its two most exorbitant figures: William Blake and Johann Georg Hamann. This chapter discusses the most startling affinities and parallels in their works, especially in their ideas about language, and makes clear their status as exorbitants, as figures who move outside the track of traditional literary history. The chapter takes inspiration from previously unknown nineteenth-century material and presents Blake and Hamann as philosophically deeply related figures who need to be read across national traditions (and, by extension, show us the limitations of these traditions). It shows how, once we take them seriously, they open up a way of thinking about central issues of the period—language, reason, religion, sexuality—in ways that radically question our standard accounts both of the periods and our own assumptions.

Unexpected Connections

This chapter establishes the historical background for the book. By drawing on previously little-used materials (from unpublished archival manuscripts to court records, book history, philosophy, belles lettres, and travelogues) it shows that, contrary to common belief, there was a wide-ranging, significant Anglo-German community in pre-1790s London in which German literature had a considerable presence. Drawing on archival and cross-disciplinary work, the chapter establishes the importance of German figures and communities, especially ecclesiastical, for London’s literary circles, most of which are either forgotten or never discussed and do not fit into generally accepted literary history. The recovery is important for literary-historical reasons, but also in order to lay the ground for a study of the exorbitant figures, such as Blake, Hamann, Fuseli, or Lavater, that emerge from it.