New essays providing an account of the shaping beliefs, preoccupations, motifs, and values of Weimar Classicism. In Germany, Weimar Classicism (roughly the period from Goethe's return to Germany from Italy in 1788 to the death of his friend and collaborator Schiller in 1805) is widely regarded as an apogee of literary art. But outside of Germany, Goethe is considered a Romantic, and the notion of Weimar Classicism as a distinct period is viewed with skepticism. This volume of new essays regards the question of literary period as a red herring: Weimar Classicism is best understood as a project that involved the ambitious attempt not only to imagine but also to achieve a new quality of wholeness in human life and culture at a time when fragmentation, division, and alienation appeared to be thenorm. By not succumbing to the myth of Weimar and its literary giants, but being willing to explore the phenomenon as a complex cultural system with a unique signature, this book provides an account of its shaping beliefs, preoccupations, motifs, and values. Contributions from leading German, British, and North American scholars open up multiple interdisciplinary perspectives on the period. Essays on the novel, poetry, drama, and theater are joined by accounts of politics, philosophy, visual culture, women writers, and science. The reader is introduced to the full panoply of cultural life in Weimar, its accomplishments as well as its excesses and follies. Emancipatory and doctrinaire by turns, the project of Weimar Classicism is best approached as a complex whole. Contributors: Dieter Borchmeyer, Charles Grair, Gail Hart, Thomas Saine, Jane Brown, Cyrus Hamlin, Roger Stephenson, Elisabeth Krimmer, Helmut Pfotenhauer, Benjamin Bennett, Astrida Orle Tantillo, W. Daniel Wilson. Simon J. Richter is Associate Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania.

Volume 12 is dedicated to founding editor Thomas P. Saine, and includes essays on Goethe's novels, plays, and poems, the Ilmpark, Bach, Ossian, Goethe reception, and Schiller. The Goethe Yearbook, first published in 1982, is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America and is dedicated to North American Goethe scholarship. It aims above all to encourage and publish original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit, while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. The book review section seeks likewise to evaluate a wide selection ofrecent publications on the period, and is important for all scholars of 18th-century literature. Volume 12 honors founding editor Thomas P. Saine with contributions from prominent scholars such as Ehrhard Bahr, Benjamin Bennett, Dieter Borchmeyer, Jane Brown, Jill Kowalik, Ruth Kluger, Meredith Lee, John McCarthy, Jeff Sammons, Helmut Schneider, Hans Vaget, and more. The volume includes essays on Goethe's novels, plays, and poems, the Ilmpark, Bach, Ossian, Goethe reception, and Schiller. Simon J. Richter is associate professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Book review editor Martha B. Helfer is associate professor of German at the University of Utah.

New essays by leading scholars re-examining major aspects of the work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the great Austrian poet and dramatist. The Viennese poet, dramatist, and prose writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) was among the most celebrated men of letters in the German language at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. His early poems established his reputation as the `child prodigy' of German letters, and a few remain among the most anthologized in the German language. His early lyric dramas prompted no less a judge than T. S. Eliot to pronounce him, along with Yeats and Claudel,one of the three European writers who had done the most to revive verse drama in modern times. His critical essays attest to the subtle powers of discrimination that marked him as one of the most discerning literary critics of the day. And yet he underwent a crisis of cognition and language around 1900, and from then on turned away from poetry and lyric drama almost entirely, concentrating instead on more public forms of drama such as the libretti for Richard Strauss's operas, the plays written for the Salzburg Festival (of which he was a co-founder), and on discursive and narrative prose. The body of work that Hofmannsthal left behind at his premature death is matched in its variety, breadth, and quality by that of only a handful of German writers. And yet posterity has not been kind to his reputation: those who admired the early work for its aesthetic refinement disdained his turn to more popular forms,whereas many of those who might have been receptive to the more committed and public stance of his later work were put off by his conservative politics. This volume of new essays by top Hofmannsthal scholars re-examines his extraordinarily rich and complex body of work, assessing his stature in German and world literature in the new century. Contributors: Katherine Arens, Judith Beniston, Benjamin Bennett, Nina Berman, Joanna Bottenberg, DouglasA. Joyce, Thomas A. Kovach, Ellen Ritter, Hinrich C. Seeba, Andreas Thomasberger, W. Edgar Yates. Professor Thomas Kovach is Head of the Department of German Studies at the University of Arizona.

New articles on topics spanning the Age of Goethe, with a special section of fresh views of Goethe's Faust. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit, while also welcomingcontributions from scholars around the world. Goethe Yearbook 17 covers the full range of the era, from Karl Guthke's essay on the early Lessing to Peter Hoeyng's on Grillparzer. Notable is a special section, co-editedby Clark Muenzer and Karin Schutjer, that samples some of the exciting new work presented at the Goethe Society conference in November 2008: 200 years after the publication of Faust I, eight essays offer fresh views of this epic masterpiece, often through novel and surprising connections. Authors link for example Faust's final ascension and the circulation of weather, verse forms in the drama and the performance of national identity, the fate of Gretchen and the occult politics of Francis Bacon. Other papers explore epistemological structures and taxonomies at work in Goethe's prose, essays, and scientific writings. Contributors: Frederick Amrine, Johannes Anderegg, Matthew Bell, Benjamin Bennett, Gerrit Bruning, Christian Clement, Pamela Currie, Ulrich Gaier, Karl Guthke, Stefan Hajduk, Peter Hoeyng, Clark Muenzer, Andrew Piper, Herb Rowland, Heather Sullivan, Chad Wellmon, Ellwood Wiggins, Markus Wilczek. Daniel Purdy is Associate Professor of German at Pennsylvania State University. Book review editor Catriona MacLeod is Associate Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania.

New essays providing an overview of the major movements, genres, and authors of 19th-century German literature in social and political context. This volume provides an overview of the major movements, genres, and authors of 19th-century German literature in the period from the death of Goethe in 1832 to the publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Although the primary focus is on imaginative literature and its genres, there is also substantial discussion of related topics, including music-drama, philosophy, and the social sciences. Literature is considered in its cultural and socio-political context, and the German literary scene takes its place in a wider European perspective. Following the editors' introduction, essays consider the impact of Romanticism on subsequent literary movements, the effectsof major movements and writers of non-German-speaking Europe on the development of German literature, and the impact of politics on the changing cultural scene. The second section presents overviews of the principal movements ofthe time (Junges Deutschland, Vormarz, Biedermeier, Poetic Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism, and Impressionism), and the third section focuses on the major genres of lyric poetry, prose fiction, drama, and music-drama. The final section provides bibliographical resources in the form of a critical bibliography and a list of primary sources. Contributors to the volume are distinguished scholars of German literature, culture, and history from North America andEurope: Andrew Webber, Lilian Furst, Arne Koch, Robert Holub, Gail Finney, Ernst Grabovszki, Benjamin Bennett, Jeffrey Sammons, Thomas Pfau, Christopher Morris, John Pizer, Thomas Spencer. Clayton Koelb is Guy B. Johnson Distinguished Professor of German at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Eric Downing is Associate Professor of German at the same institution.