The work of French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot 19072003 is without doubt among the most challenging the twentieth century has to offer. Contemporary debate in literature philosophy and politics has yet to fully acknowledge its discreet but enduring impact. Arising from a conference that took place in Oxford in 2009 this book sets itself a simple if daunting task that of measuring the impact and responding to the challenge of Blanchots work by addressing its engagement with the Romantic legacy in particular but not only that of the Jena Romantics. Drawing upon a wide range of philosophers and poets associated directly or indirectly with German Romanticism Kant Fichte Goethe Jean Paul Novalis the Schlegels Hlderlin the authors of this volume explore how Blanchots fictional critical and fragmentary texts rewrite and rethink the Romantic demand in relation to questions of criticism and reflexivity irony and subjectivity narrative and genre the sublime and the neutre the Work and the fragment quotation and translation. Reading Blanchot with or against key twentiethcentury thinkers Benjamin Foucault de Man they also examine Romantic and postRomantic notions of history imagination literary theory melancholy affect love revolution community and other central themes that Blanchots writings deploy across the century from JeanPaul Sartre to JeanLuc Nancy. This book contains contributions in both English and French.