Drawing from a wide array of philosophical, literary, scientific, and poetic writings by the German philosophical poet and member of the early Romantic movement, Friedrich von Hardenberg (otherwise known by his nom de plume Novalis), Novalis's Philosophical Fictions is the first volume in English to offer a sustained philosophical interpretation of Novalis's work as a whole. The volume begins with the extensive notebooks on Fichte (compiled in 1795/6) and culminates in the late lyric work of his final productive years, the Hymns to the Night (1800).

Along the way, James D. Reid provides detailed expositions of Novalis's engagements with Kant, his writings on nature and natural science, his reflections on politics, and his two unfinished philosophical novels (The Disciples at Saïs and Heinrich von Ofterdingen). Against readings that view the literary and poetic texts, especially the Hymns, as evidence of a defection from philosophy, occasioned, so the story goes, by the death of Novalis's young fiancée in the spring of 1797, Reid argues for a continuous line of philosophical development from 1795-1800 and provides a novel interpretation of Novalis's own emerging philosophy, which he calls 'magical idealism,' as a compelling theory of the relationship between human life and the natural and social worlds.

In connection with the exegetical work, the volume develops a conception of philosophy as a form of imaginative activity, argues for the importance of literary and poetic modes of writing in the execution of philosophy's tasks, and defends the power of poetically informed philosophy to give voice to deep and abiding human concerns, at once moral, political, scientific, and religious.