Creativity was fundamental to aesthetic theory and production in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German lands, and it connects two of my projects. In an earlier article on the physiognomist, Johann Caspar Lavater, I trace how theories of reproduction reflect competing notions of creativity during the eighteenth century. Is creativity the faithful imitation of nature (including those images of nature stored in the imagination) according to rules and forms established in literary tradition, as Johann Christoph Gottsched asserted? Or is creativity the expression of the unfettered imagination, of probable and even fantastical or mythical realities born in the imagination, as Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger claimed? The slippage between faithful and imaginative reproduction enables pseudo-sciences such as Lavater’s physiognomy to emerge. In a forthcoming co-edited volume (Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture: Literary Joint Ventures, 1750-1850, Bloomsbury), I highlight competing notions of creativity and their relation to gender in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The conventional understanding of creativity in the “Sturm und Drang” era and Romanticism was of a cult of genius, where creativity resided within a sole artist, usually male. Yet in Romanticism we also find the notion of Symphilosophieren (symphilosophizing), where creativity was considered a collaborative endeavor in which group interaction overshadowed individual contributions. This volume highlights male-female collaborative endeavors that challenge the single-author model of creativity, asserting not only that creativity is a more complex and seldom isolated project, but that it is also bound to dynamics of gender and power.