'Deftly argued and wide-ranging, Hampton's new book is a breakthrough in our understanding of what may well have been the most exciting fifteen years in German literary and intellectual history. The compelling readings of Herder, Moritz, Jacobi, Fichte, Schiller, Novalis, Schlegel, and Hölderlin, offered here are further enriched by the author's impressive grasp of Romanticism's philosophical and theological backstory. Hampton makes a compelling case for a Romantic dialectic circumscribed less by Spinoza and Fichte than by the participatory ontology of a Christian realism whose deep Platonic roots have long been under-appreciated. In tracing early Romanticism's development of 'a new language of transcendence in an age that had come to think in terms of immanence', Hampton has given us a startlingly original appraisal of a period when questions of transcendence were shaping, perhaps for the last time in European thought, the project of cultural and social self-understanding.' Thomas Pfau, Duke University, North Carolinarsity, North Carolina.