Naturens Amfiteater. Kunstens natur

Friederike Brun, née: Münter (1765–1835) became a famous writer in the German-speaking areas of Europe around 1800. She published collections of poems and travelogues in German, brought up as she was in the German and cosmopolitan circle in Copenhagen around Klopstock, Gerstenberg, her father, court chaplain Balthasar Münter, and others. Not least the writings of Ossian (MacPherson), Shakespeare, Gray and Richardson influenced her together with J. J. Rousseau. This contribution focuses on her early writings from 1782 until 1790. They have so far been neglected in research, being the products of a young woman, but they show the wide horizon of her circle, her father’s education of her, his introduction of her to the German intellectual elite of the time and her talent as a writer in a sentimental and enlightened-romantic tradition inspired by Schiller and Herder. She is interested in the aesthetics of nature and the relations between nature and culture and can in this respect be seen as an early ecocritical writer. Furthermore, she demonstrates female emancipation around 1800 and a cosmopolitical consciousness in a Europe heading towards national boundaries as well as language and gender barriers.