Winner of the 2014 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for Best Book on Romanticism

In Fugitive Objects, Catriona MacLeod examines the question of why sculpture is both intensively discussed and yet rendered immaterial in German literature. She focuses on three forms of disappearance: sculpture’s vanishing as a legitimate art form at the beginning of the nineteenth century in German aesthetics, statues’ migration from the domain of high art into mass reproduction and popular culture, and sculpture’s dislodging and relocation into literary discourse. Through original readings of Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Adalbert Stifter, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and others, MacLeod reveals that if sculpture has disappeared from much of nineteenth-century German literature and aesthetics, it is a vanishing act that paradoxically relocates the statue back onto another cultural pedestal, attesting to the powerful force of the medium.

"Grounding her argument in historical context and close readings, MacLeod theorizes the cultural absence of nineteenth-century sculpture while simultaneously enumerating and analyzing its many appearances in literature. Fugitive Objects is an important and timely book not only because of its revolutionary analysis of literary sculptures, but also because it raises profound questions about the essence of art and literature that resonate in the nineteenth century as well as today." —Lauren Nossett, German Studies Review