Abstract: “Myth, Nature, and the Sacred: Reimagining Cultural Value in German and Indian Romanticism”
This paper explores how Romantic literature in Germany and colonial India challenged dominant ideas of
value by turning to myth, nature, and the sacred. In both contexts, writers looked beyond Enlightenment
rationalism and the emerging focus on utility and material gain, offering instead alternative frameworks
for thinking about what matters, culturally, spiritually, and ecologically.
In German Romanticism, authors like Novalis and Eichendorff treated myth and landscape not as
decorative motifs, but as carriers of meaning. Works like Heinrich von Ofterdingen by Novalis evoke a
metaphysical connection between imagination and the natural world, where value is shaped not through
function but feeling, vision, and symbolic resonance. Meanwhile, in India, poets such as Toru Dutt used
mythic material to navigate the pressures of colonial modernity. Her Ancient Ballads and Legends of
Hindustan rewrites classical Indian and Western myths into deeply personal, often gendered, reflections
on loss, identity, and cultural survival. These weren’t nostalgic gestures, but acts of resistance, where
reclaiming the sacred meant reclaiming the right to assign value outside imperial logic.
The paper argues that both traditions, though emerging from different historical trajectories, converge in
their refusal to separate aesthetics from ethics, nature from spirit, or myth from modernity. Drawing on
postcolonial and ecocritical approaches, it examines how Romanticism’s use of form, the fragment, the
ballad, the lyric pastoral, becomes part of this negotiation, offering literary spaces where dominant
systems of value can be questioned or undone.
What connects these two Romanticisms is not similarity, but a shared impulse to reimagine worth: of
land, of language, of cultural memory, of the feminine, and of the nonhuman. They don’t only describe
value, they shape it. And they do so by holding open the possibility that meaning might still be found in
the very things modern systems overlook.
Ultimately, the paper suggests that Romanticism’s investment in myth and the sacred was never an
escape, it was a counter-vision. And in re-reading these traditions side by side, we are reminded that the
struggle to define value has always been, and still is, a deeply cultural and literary act.
Bio: (Independent scholar, Gurgaon, India)
Prachi Sharma is an academic researcher based in India, with a PhD in English Literature focusing on Romanticism, myth, and cross-cultural storytelling. Her doctoral dissertation explored Romantic literary influences on Indian English poetry. She has given lectures in Romanticism and Indian literature, and her recent publications include work on mysticism, gendered poetics, and Toru Dutt’s engagement with resistance aesthetics. Sharma is currently preparing a postdoctoral project titled “Myth and Nature in Romanticism: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of German and Indian Folklore”, for the Humboldt Research Fellowship application. She also works as an academic editor, helping scholars refine their work across disciplines and citation styles.