This collection of essays builds on recent scholarship on German philosophies of nature (Naturphilosophie) to argue for a Romantic aesthetics grounded in nature and the real. It brings researchers from philosophy, aesthetics, and literary studies into dialogue around key writers like F. W. J. Schelling, Novalis, and the Schlegel brothers, and pushes back against some of the conventional formalist and psychologizing frameworks through which Romanticism has been viewed traditionally. Instead, these contributions develop a picture of Romanticism as not only having aimed to 'represent' things conceptually or linguistically, but as capable of acting on, existing within, and indeed participating in processes of worldmaking. The resulting image is of a Romanticism pushing at the boundaries of materialist and idealist conceptualizations of the real in equal measure. The contributions fall along two main axes, represented by two sections and an afterword.

The first section addresses Schelling directly and explores the potential of his philosophy for literary and aesthetic theory. The second section brings Schelling into dialogue with literary practices around 1800 to address broader ramifications for our understanding of authors like Novalis, Hoffmann, Coleridge, and Droste-Hülshoff, also seeking to establish the contemporary viability of Schelling's thought and its long-overlooked cultural ramifications, including in contemporary environmental thinking.