New, specially commissioned essays providing an in-depth scholarly introduction to the great thinker of the European Enlightenment. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is one of the great names of the classical age of German literature. One of the last universalists, he wrote on aesthetics, literary history and theory, historiography, anthropology, psychology,education, and theology; translated and adapted poetry from ancient Greek, English, Italian, even from Persian and Arabic; collected folk songs from around the world; and pioneered a better understanding of non-European cultures.A student of Kant's, he became Goethe's mentor in Strasbourg, and was a mastermind of the Sturm und Drang and a luminary of classical Weimar. But the wide range of Herder's interests and writings, along with his unorthodox ways of seeing things, seems to have prevented him being fully appreciated for any of them. His image has also been clouded by association with political ideologies, the proponents of which ignored the message of Humanitat in histexts. So although Herder is acknowledged by scholars to be one of the great thinkers of European Enlightenment, there is no up-to-date, comprehensive introduction to his works in English, a lacuna this book fills with seventeennew, specially commissioned essays. Contributors: Hans Adler, Wulf Koepke, Steven Martinson, Marion Heinz and Heinrich Clairmont, John Zammito, Jurgen Trabant, Stefan Greif, Ulrich Gaier, Karl Menges, Christoph Bultmann, Martin Kessler, Arnd Bohm, Gerhard Sauder, Robert E. Norton, Harro Muller-Michaels, Gunter Arnold, Kurt Kloocke, and Ernest A. Menze. Hans Adler is Halls-Bascom Professor of Modern Literature Studies at the Universityof Wisconsin-Madison. Wulf Koepke is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German, Texas A&M University and recipient of the Medal of the International J. G. Herder Society.

Carefully focused essays on major aspects of one of the most significant German literary movements, the Storm and Stress. Sturm und Drang refers to a set of values and a style of writing that arose in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century, a particularly intense kind of pre-Romanticism that has often been represented as marking the beginning of an independent modern German culture. The circle of writers around the young Goethe, including Herder, Lenz, Klinger, and later Schiller, felt frustrated by the Enlightenment world of reason, balance, and control, and turned instead to nature as the source of authentic experience. Inspired by Rousseau and Herder, by Shakespeare, and by folk culture, they rebelled against propriety and experimented with new literary forms, their creative energy bursting through conventions that seemed staid and artificial. The Sturm und Drang has often been cited by those attempting to legitimate nationalism and irrationalism, but scholars have more recently emphasized the diversity of the movement and the links between it and the Enlightenment. This volume of essays by leading scholars from the UK, the US, and Germany illuminates the guiding ideas of the movement, discussing its most important authors, texts, and ideas, and taking account of the variety and complexity of the movement, placing it more securely within late-eighteenth-century European history. The main focus is on literature, and in particular on the drama, which was of special importance to the Sturm und Drang. However, the essays also outline the social conditions that gave rise to the movement, and consideration is given to different currents of ideas that underlie the movement, including areas of thought and bodies of work that traditional approaches have tended to marginalize. Contributors: Bruce Duncan, Howard Gaskill, Wulf Koepke, Susanne Kord, Frank Lamport, Alan Leidner, Matthias Luserke, Michael Patterson, Gerhard Sauder, Margaret Stoljar, Daniel Wilson, Karin Wurst. David Hill is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of German Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK.