This collection presents research results of the Collaborative Research Centre 600 'Strangers and Poor People. Changing Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion from Classical Antiquity to the Present Day' at Trier University. It deals with central problems of social inclusion in societies of Europe and the Mediterranean World since Antiquity. The articles assembled here explore fundamental dimensions of the self-concepts of societies and social groups. From the perspectives of different disciplines, as History, History of Law, Literature Studies and Social Sciences, they focus on five main research areas: theoretical concepts of inclusion and exclusion, rights of membership and the inclusion of strangers in political spaces, religious dimensions of poor relief from the Middle Ages up into the twentieth Century, poor law and politics of poverty and the semantics of inclusion and exclusion.

The volume assembles the contributions to an international symposium on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the death of Friedrich von Hardenberg (= Novalis, 1772-1801). An approach based on close study of imagination, poetics, anthropology, and Novalis' literary writings shows that his concerns were a product of the Enlightenment, and the solutions he outlined were also very much of the 1790s. But the essential role played by 'productive imagination' also points forward, to later modernism. Some of the perspectives it opens up include the rivalry between religion and art, an interpretation of evolution as a non-teleological 'feedback' between 'mind' and 'nature', self-invention of the ego in an 'intermediary space' (Winnicott), and an awareness of symbolizations in gender discourse. It also anticipates the foundations for cubist abstraction in the 20th century.

One of the central concerns of contemporary German studies is the question of the relationship between cultural and literary alterity. What potentialities and limitations are there for the aesthetic representation of cultural difference in the literary artwork? The present volume takes up the discussion by examining the treatment of Haiti in Kleist's "Verlobung in St.Domingo," Anna Seghers' "Karibische Geschichten," Heiner MA1/4ller's "Der Auftrag," Hans Christoph Buch's "Die Hochzeit von Port-au-Prince" and Hubert Fichte's "Xango."

Engagement with the sciences is an integral feature of Novalis' work. Hardly any other author in the Classic and Romantic period can match the intensity and competence of his concern with the achievements of contemporary research and the structural patterns underlying the organization of knowledge. This volume contains the papers delivered at the 1st meeting of the International Novalis Society. The approaches range from the critical examination of sources through historical-hermeneutic perspectives to discourse-analytic studies, but they all demonstrate how Novalis' 'poeticization' of the sciences both extends and unifies them.

ABlA1/4thenstaubA, the title of the famous collection of fragments by Novalis, stands here for the entire oeuvre of the Romantic German poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801). The volume documents the second congress of the International Novalis Society, which was devoted to the reception and impact of Novalis' work not only on literary posterity but also on the other arts. The main focus is on the reception accorded to Novalis in German Romanticism, in other countries (Britain, USA, Italy, Poland, Russia), and in modern literature, supplemented by studies of musical settings of his work and his reception in Catholicism, anthroposophic thinking, etc. The 200-year history of his impact, traced here in its full implications for the first time, shows that to an impressive and hitherto unknown extent, Novalis' works have been the object of a wide range of productive acquisition and critical engagement both within German-speaking countries and abroad. The >literary seeds

Diese Arbeit widmet sich der Einordnung der Karoline von Gunderrode in den Epochenkontext um 1800 unter Einbeziehung ihrer philosophischen Studien. Ihre Exzerpte, die sich mit den wichtigsten Vertretern der fruhromantischen Philosophie und Literatur auseinandersetzen, werden systematisch mit den von ihr rezipierten Quellen verglichen. Ausgehend von den spezifischen Schwerpunkten der Philosophie wird ihr Einfluss auf das literarische Werk untersucht, vor allem anhand der Verbindung von Liebe und Tod und der naturphilosophischen Konzepte. In der ambivalenten Gestaltung der Subjektivitatsproblematik, die sich etwa auch in den Werken Kleists und Tiecks nachweisen lasst, und in der Hinwendung zur Naturphilosophie zeigt sich Gunderrodes besondere Stellung im UEbergang von der Fruh- zur Spatromantik.