"The Revivifying Word shows how the intersection of Romantic philosophy, aesthetics, and theory of life put reanimating acts of reading at the center of intellectual attention. German theorists, building on the Apostle Paul's assertion that the dead letter can be revivified by the living spirit, proposed a permeable, legible boundary between the living-world and the realm of the dead. This proposal inaugurated a revolution in European aesthetics, implanting the germ of an extraordinarily productive narrative idea that enriched Romantic literature for decades."--Jacket.