A gap divides modern ideas of genius from the sentimental conceptions of the 1760s and 1770s. Though talent was a common feature, musical genius for Rousseau and Diderot was integrally related to expression, affective identification with a community, and an orientation towards ‘the people’. Also important was ‘enthusiasm’, originally a type of religious inspiration fostered after 1700 within radical Protestant groups such as Count Zinzendorf’s Moravians, who radically challenged contemporary ideas of masculinity, sexuality and religious faith. Enthusiasm’s secularization with Goethe and Herder initiated the countercultural ‘period of genius’ (Genieperiode) later known as the Sturm und Drang. Its composers, such as J. M. Kraus, Neefe and Reichardt, lavished attention on popular, commercial forms such as German comic opera and ‘popular song’ (Volkslied) – priorities only challenged when the movement’s opponents such as J. N. Forkel tactically redefined ‘genius’ to centre it on technical mastery rather than inspiration and expression.

If free harmony of the faculties is the aim of the power of judgment and the ground of the pleasure of taste, the free activity of the imagination is obviously crucial. The only place where Kant investigates the productively free operation of the imagination are the sections on art in the Critique, that is, the sections in which he is concerned not so much with taste as with the productive activity in the artistic genius. Kant characterizes this ultimately inscrutable activity as the production of ‘aesthetic ideas’ by the imagination. The often-noted disconnect between Kant’s account of taste at the beginning of Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and his subsequent theory of art can be resolved; in fact, the theory of artistic productivity is an indispensable complement to the analysis of taste.

This chapter considers the ways in which Anthony Trollope at first defied but eventually exemplified alternate ideas of creativity for successive generations. With the appearance of each of his books, contemporaries acknowledged his almost continuous labor. Later critics agreed, using more psychological terms: If Trollope was a genius, his sort of genius bordered on automatism: habitual, lacking in forethought, and suspiciously unbeholden to inspiration. Through the first half of the twentieth century, Trollope’s writing process (as described in An Autobiography) and his prose were implicitly evaluated against two dichotomies permeating behavioral studies: The first pits introspection against habit, and the second sets remote against inhibited associations. Each dichotomy poses an invidious distinction between the first and second terms. An evaluation of Trollope’s composition and style within this framework yields differing models of creative writing.

While her career remains vastly understudied, the Anglo-Italian narrative and portrait painter Maria Cosway (1760–1838) reached rare levels of recognition for an artist of any sex during her life by exhibiting to regular acclaim at London’s Royal Academy from 1781 to 1801. In these same years, and after she ceased exhibiting, Cosway also consistently engaged with print – an aspect of her artistic practice that has yet to be the subject of sustained scholarly work.

This chapter offers an initial foray into understanding Cosway’s relationship with and steady pursuit of the printed medium. Above all, it emphasises the implicitly professional nature of her published endeavours – according to definitions of professionalism at the time – by highlighting her contributions to five artistic, didactic printed series executed in London and Paris. Why print, and why these projects? What did she see in the medium that she may not have found in her painting practice? How might gender have factored into these decisions and, vitally, into her works’ reception? After two decades in the public eye, what was at stake for Cosway – might she have used print to claim a discrete identity as an artistic professional?

Chapter 1 reconstructs the conceptual history of tact as a social, ethical, and aesthetic category. Starting out with Voltaire’s 1769 definition that marks tact’s fundamental paradigm shift from a sense of feeling to a form of sociability, I reconstruct the word’s ensuing career as a key concept in 19th- and 20th-century pedagogical, philosophical, and literary discourse. I discuss tact’s history within the context of the demise of the ancien régime and the rise of the bourgeois subject, reflecting on a variety of different historical and philosophical explanations (Elias, Adorno, Foucault). I reconstruct how and why, around 1800, tact turns into a key philosophical term, depicting an intuitive form of empirical judgement (Kant). I show how, in the second half of the 19th century, tact, understood as an individual deviation from normative structures, came to occupy a key position in the method dispute between the humanities and the natural sciences (Helmholtz). I conclude by reflecting on how psychological tact went on to become a key category in modern and contemporary hermeneutics, uniting the otherwise antagonistic work of scholars incl. Adorno, Gadamer, Barthes, Felski, and Macé.

This chapter considers how Fantasy has been shaped by and shaped modern understandings that privilege facts, realism and scientific knowledge. It argues that while Fantasy has often been belittled by discourses that seek to define what is true, right and possible, fantasies have engaged in good faith with such discourses while serving as valuable means for negotiating their limitations. The chapter begins by discussing Enlightenment and its oversights, before pivoting to discuss how Fantasy was side-lined by discourses of genius that exalted authors and demeaned audiences, setting Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Francis Jeffrey against more sympathetic appraisals by Joseph Addison, Charles Lamb and George MacDonald. The back half of the chapter explores how Fantasy engages critically with dominant rationalist and realist understandings that emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, considering works including Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, the animated series Arcane, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Rivers Solomon’s The Deep.

The aim of this chapter is to show how objects of beauty in the world indirectly exhibit the supersensible “without,” that is, the Idea of the highest good. This I take is the meaning of Kant’s claim that beauty is a “symbol of morality.” The fact that the experience of beauty serves as a sign that the world may be hospitable for the realization of the highest good can have a merely psychological significance, namely, that of maintaining the existent moral disposition. Yet, the significance of this sign can move beyond its merely psychological effects insofar as it reinforces the view that the final end must be the end of nature. The experience of beauty renders the Idea of the highest good objectively real in a special way, which adds the cognitive dimension to aesthetic experience that is best explained in proximity to Kant’s notion of practical cognition.

Returning to my lessons learned as a young writer, I talk about the journey from little-c to Pro-c and, potentially, to Big-C. Different nuances of Pro-c are explored, with a particular emphasis on creative domains. Drawing on the amusement park theory, I analyze which are the key domains or the larger areas that are most important for creativity. Exploring self-assessment measures, I reflect on how we measure creativity across domains in a way that demonstrates an art bias (and, to a degree, a bias in science) on the part of researchers. I then consider what it takes to have your creative efforts continue making an impact even after your death – a mix of your actual contributions, personal traits, level of influence, and simple luck.

Chapter 5 treats Kant’s notions of genius and aesthetic ideas. It argues that his discussion of genius forms a kind of deduction for the possibility of producing and then judging objects that exceed our own capacities. In this, it focuses on Kant’s descriptions of spirit as what nature gives both to the genius and thereby also to the work of beautiful art, thus allowing it to enliven our minds. This playful enlivening through spirit is what makes it possible for the human mind to present, in art, what otherwise exceeds it, namely aesthetic ideas. Here, we find that human beings belong to a nature that is much more expansive than the one ruled by the understanding in the first Critique; nature here is the source of spirit and liveliness. The chapter concludes by highlighting Kant’s repeated observations that nature is expressing itself through genius, and links this to the communicability that underlies the judgment of taste more generally.

Chapter 5 examines Kant’s modern theory of the fine arts with reference to his predecessors, in particular, Charles Batteux and Christian Wolff. Kant experiments with different classificatory themes over the years. Starting in the mid-1770s, Kant conceives of aesthetic experiences of fine art as evoking a free play between the imagination and understanding, distinguishes fine art from handicraft, and views the fine arts as products of genius (and spirit) that express or exhibit aesthetic ideas.

Cheryl Foster examines Schopenhauer’s theory of genius, which she situates within a politics of knowledge. Many of our dominant social institutions devalue the arts which are overlooked as potential sources of knowledge. Foster argues that Schopenhauer (despite his own strong resources of bigotry) is in a position to address this injustice by making an argument for the distinction between talent and genius, or conceptual and intuitive understanding, and making a strong argument for the significance and distinctiveness of aesthetic, intuitive cognition. Foster looks carefully at Schopenhauer’s description of the experience of artistic inspiration, the receptivity distinctive of genius that enables artists to create aesthetically significant works. She finds that Schopenhauer has unexpected confirmation in the account Edith Wharton gave of her own artistic process. To realize the potential of Schopenhauer’s analysis, we need to free him from some of his reactionary investments, such as his anti-Semitism, misogyny, elitism, and mystifications. Foster carefully reconstructs a theory of genius and intuitive cognition that is both free from these elements and consistent with the phenomenology of artistic experience as reported by practicing artists. The result is a useful and accurate account of a vital source of nonconceptual knowledge.

Judith Norman takes up the complicated question of feminism in WWR.Political critiques of the history of philosophy frequently accuse philosophers of illegitimately universalizing a particular view of subjectivity – unwittingly normalizing a parochial conception of human nature, for instance.Although this is a critique that can undoubtedly be extended to Schopenhauer, it is striking that Nietzsche, drawing largely on metaphysical resources derived from Schopenhauer, was one of the first to really recognize and contest this illegitimate philosophical strategy. Norman looks at the extent to which Schopenhauer anticipated Nietzsche in this project of tracing a genealogy of the subject within a metaphysics of will, closely examining Schopenhauer’s fraught discussion of sexual difference in “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love.” This leads her to the question of the ontological status of sexual difference, and whether this cleft in nature registers at the level of transcendental subjectivity, and the consequences for Schopenhauer’s view of the subject, the question of women readers of the text, and women subjects of philosophy in general.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

The introduction opens with a reading of a passage from a 1914 letter by D. H. Lawrence to establish three major facets of the book’s argument: (1) for many modernists, cross-sex collaboration offered a practical way of using gender difference as a source of creative energy; (2) both Lawrence and many of his contemporaries viewed shared creative activity between women and men as deeply and positively subversive; and (3) rather than envisioning cross-sex collaboration as a harmonious synthesis of opposites, Lawrence revels in the prospect of its leading to unresolvable gender conflict. It then introduces my concept of the discord aesthetic, which refers to the modernists’ tendency to use conflict between the sexes as a creative catalyst and infuse the texts they made together with evidence of that conflict; situates my argument with respect to prior scholarship on the intersections between modernism, gender, and literary couplings; and acknowledges my debt to the textual scholarship methodology of reading the linguistic and material dimensions of texts as working together to create meaning.

Chapter 5 considers the implications of modernist efforts to rethink notions of gender and creative autonomy for our understanding of genius. Although some writers and artists imagined androgyny as something a man and woman could achieve together, the same does not appear to have been true of genius, which remains for the modernists a phenomenon exhibited or embodied by individuals. I contend that the modernists’ own practice of cross-sex collaboration challenges this conception, as evidenced by two examples: the play Cathleen ni Houlihan, by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and the novel Under the Volcano, written by Malcolm Lowry with significant input from his second wife, Margerie Bonner Lowry. Neither of these masterpieces could have been realized by just one of its coauthors alone, yet no member of either couple thought of that couple itself as “a genius.” This limitation on the conception of genius came with significant personal costs and misrepresents the true nature of the writers’ powerful displays of joint creativity. Genius, I conclude, is not solely the provenance of individuals but an invaluable human capacity that can draw strength from both male and female participation.

This “guided tour” of the Lives of the Poets explores Johnson’s criteria for poetry, starting from his discussion of the metaphysical poets. What Johnson says about Gray’s Elegy is related to the commemorative impulse in the Lives. The ironic vision of the Life of Savage is argued to underlie that comedic understanding of the complex relation between writing and life that frequently surfaces elsewhere. Four major writers then get special attention, in which literary appreciation and quasi-personal relationship go hand in hand. Johnson’s intensely held ambivalence about Paradise Lost pays reluctant tribute to Milton’s own capaciousness of mind. Swift’s rigor toward himself and others is met by Johnson’s correspondingly acerbic, unforgiving account. Dryden’s roving, fluid, omni-curious intelligence, his hospitality to the occasional and contingent, is matched by the relaxed generosity and miscellaneousness of Johnson’s Life of Dryden, as contrasted with the careful scrutiny afforded to the life and work of the self-aware, self-critical, aspiring Pope.

Whatever affects the brain structures the creative trance, and what we view as imperfections may instead be alternate pathways to achievement. None of us is perfect, but as Jung says, we have an inner dynamic wholeness that transcends perfection and fuels self-evolution. The creative people in this chapter use dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, now known as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), to access their wholeness, and this, in turn, drives and shapes their creative trance. Eminent writers with dyslexia include Agatha Christie, William Butler Yeats, Jules Verne, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Amadeus Mozart and Frank Lloyd Wright used the reveries of ADHD to create completed works in their minds, and Leonardo da Vinci who had both dyslexia and ADHD changed the course of Western art history. What makes life most difficult can also inspire strength, innovation, and genius. As the poet Emily Dickinson writes, “A wounded deer leaps the highest.”