Includes bibliographical references (pages 347-371) and index.

Introduction: Performing knowledge, 1750-1850 / Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel -- Sounds and stages / Viktoria Tkaczyk -- The making of acoustics around 1800, or how to do science with words / Dietmar Till -- The fate of rhetoric in the "long" eighteenth century / Ellwood Wiggins -- Pity play: sympathy and spectatorship in Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson and Adam Smith's Theory of moral sentiments / Rebecca Wolf -- The sound of glass: transparency and danger / Mary Helen Dupree -- Early Schiller memorials (1805-1808) and the performance of literary knowledge / Hans-Georg von Arburg -- Modern architecture takes the stage: Karl Friedrich Schinkel's architectural spectacles: pedagogies and publics / Claire Baldwin -- Performance and play: Lichtenberg's lectures on experimental physics / Chad Wellmon -- Kant on the logic of anthropology and the ethics of disciplinarity / Michael Bies -- Staging the knowledge of plants: Goethe's elegy "The metamorphosis of plants" / Edgar Landgraf -- Playing to the public: performing politics in Heinrich von Kleist / Sean Franzel -- Constructions of the present and the philosophy of history in the lecture form / Adrian Daub -- Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of musical knowledge: the case of the piano / Angela Esterhammer -- Afterword: the audience, the public, and the improvisator Maximilian Langenschwarz.

This volume addresses how practices and concepts of performance contribute to the production and circulation of knowledge in German-speaking Europe between 1750 and 1850. Building on recent work in the history of science, media theory, and performance theory, the essays in this volume discuss a range of different scholarly, literary, musical, and theatrical scenes of performance and take up the question of knowledge transfers in new ways -- Provided by publisher