Fresh essays on the works of the most significant -- and readable -- German Baroque author. Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (ca. 1621-1676) is the most significant (and still readable) author of seventeenth-century German novels. His Abenteuerlicher Simplicius Simplicissimus remains the one German novelof its time that has attained the stature of "world literature": its unique mix of violent action and solitary reflection, its superlative humor, its realistic portrayal of a peasant turned soldier turned hermit has made it the longest-running bestseller in German literature. Read by students and scholars in comparative literature, history, and German, and by those interested in the development of the picaresque novel in Europe, the work and its "Continuations" have increasingly occupied scholars around the world, who have in recent years shown it to be a work of subtle structure and characterization, bearing the imprint of the most advanced political thinking of the time, and showing the influences of some of the most significant works of world literature, including Cervantes' Don Quixote and Barclay's Argenis. This volume of essays by leading Grimmelshausen scholars from Germany, the UnitedStates, and England provides analyses of significant topics in his life and works, including questions of genre, structure, satire, allegory, narratology, political thought, religion, morality, humor, realism, and mortality. Contributors: Christoph E. Schweitzer, Italo Michele Battafarano, Klaus Haberkamm, Rosmarie Zeller, Andreas Solbach, Dieter Breuer, Lynne Tatlock, Peter Hess, Shannon Keenan Greene, and Alan Menhennet. Karl F. Otto is Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania and has written extensively on German Baroque literature.

This is the first full-length monograph on the Baroque novelist Johann Beer (1655-1700) since Richard Alewyn's discovery of the author in 1933, and is the first study presenting Beer's entire narrative production. Alewyn restricted his investigations to a small number of central texts, leaving a large number of minor works out of account. The present study takes a different course, analyzing Beer's entire narrative oeuvre as the changing expression of a fundamentally consistent narrative intention.

The volume assembles the findings of an interdisciplinary symposium revolving around the concept of 'edification', which has hitherto been primarily regarded from a religious vantage. Here, however, literary scholars, art scholars, musicologists, and cultural studies experts aim at achieving a broader understanding of the term, both in its content and in its definition. Accordingly, interest is not restricted to edifying literature but extends to an examination of edification as manifested in different media. The result is a broader understanding of its diversity and its historical development up to the present.

New essays on the works and themes of Hesse, one of the most perennially relevant and widely-read German authors. Today, forty years after Timothy Leary's suggestion that hippies read Hermann Hesse while "turning on," Hesse is once again receiving attention: faced with ubiquitous materialism, war, and ecological disaster, we discover that these problems have found universal expression in the works of this master storyteller. Hesse explores perennial themes, from the simple to the transcendental. Because he knows of the awkwardness of adolescence and the pressures exerted on us to conform, his books hold special appeal for young readers and are taught widely. Yet he is equally relevant for older readers, writing about the torment of a psyche in despair, or our fear of the unknown. All these experiences are explored from the perspective of the individual self, for Hesse the repository of the divine and the sole entity to which we are accountable. This volume of new essays sheds light on his major works, including Siddhartha, Der Steppenwolf, and Das Glasperlenspiel, as well as Rosshalde, Klingsors letzter Sommer, Klein und Wagner, and the poetry. Another six essays explore Hesse's interest in psychoanalysis, music, and easternphilosophy, the development of his political views, the influence of his painting on his writing, and the relationship between Hesse and Goethe. Contributors: Jefford Vahlbusch, Osman Durrani, Andreas Solbach, Ralph Freedman, Adrian Hsia, Stefan Hoeppner, Martin Swales, Frederick Lubich, Paul Bishop, Olaf Berwald, Kamakshi Murti, Marco Schickling, Volker Michels, Godela Weiss-Sussex, C. Immo Schneider, Hans-Joachim Hahn. Ingo Cornilsis Professor of German at the University of Leeds.