Katja Battenfeld

European cultural history is pervaded by an element of aesthetic and religious pleasure of grief, which originates, as Heinrich Heine states, in the Christian traditions of thinking and feeling. Especially Pietism cultivated this phenomenon in its practical and aesthetic developments of Christianity.

This doctoral thesis discusses the literary traces of the pleasure of grief in the 18th century by means of a comparative study. Related to the debate about melancholy, the mild pleasure arousing from fictitious grief is a mixed emotion embedded in sentimental ethics and aesthetics. Religious images of a moderate grief are suggested and discussed within contemporary literature. The aesthetic grief is often a grotesque phenomenon of an awakening pursuit for the individual’s self-experience. It is to be found in a central position of reciprocal enrichment between religious and secular literature, where it affects every gender and class.

The thesis is meant to be a contribution to the study of aesthetics, anthropology and the culture of emotions of the Enlightenment. The focus of my research is on a strategy of action that is centred on emotions. Its social acceptance derives from an interface between religious and secular literature. Well known works of authors as E. Young ('Night-Thoughts') and J. Macpherson ('The Poems of Ossian') serve as examples for the development of a pleasure of grief. The chosen timeframe extends from 1740 to 1790. Further authors, which are going to be con-sidered, are Klopstock, Hölty, Herder and Moritz. Their works convey the importance of self-reflecting emotions for an individual. The cultivation of an aesthetic grief is based on such a self-reflecting faculty. The phenomenon of desirable grief documents the important role of coded emotions in religious practise, the constitution of personal identity and finally the production and reception of art.