The thirteen papers in this volume span the period from the Early Enlightenment to the end of Romanticism and reconstruct the system of literature and thought of what is known as a ~The Age of Goethea (TM) from approx. 1770 to 1830. On the basis of a comprehensive corpus of texts from German literature, the papers illuminate not only their pre-conditions from the European Enlightenment but also the relations between literature and the theoretical discourses of (popular) philosophy, theology, medicine, anthropology and jurisprudence.

Careful analysis of school dramas and poetological texts by Christian Weise (1642-1708) reveals the crisis of emblematic argumentation figures and a semantics based on similarity and circularity. At the same time, Weise's attempts to move away from self-reference to difference are confronted with a change from the theatre to the printed book. Both these phenomena open up a problematic constellation that not only left its mark on late 17th century school drama but also occasioned a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the didactic ambitions and epistemological rhetoric of dramatic literature in the period between Baroque and the Enlightenment.

"Sign and Time" identifies crucial components of the 19th century conception of realism and reconstructs their interplay in narrative texts written between 1840 and 1910. Selective analyses of texts by Storm, Fontane etc. are undertaken with a view to highlighting what they have to tell us about the history of discourse(s). Semiologically, realism is notable for the way it plays off the linguistic against the graphic, metonymy against metaphor, and rails against the hazards of visual kinds of imagination. This can be interpreted as a response to the increasing competition from other media, more precisely as a species of literary self-referentiality in the face of the advent of film and the attendant awareness of the psychological and evocative limits necessarily imposed on this kind of literature.

The Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon is one of the best known, most comprehensive and most reliable reference works on German literature. Spanning the ages, the work encompasses writers from all eras, ranging from the Middle Ages to the present day. Volume 28 contains, among other, articles on Walther von der Vogelweide, Fred and Maxie Wander, Aby Warburg, Jakob Wassermann and Max Weber. In line with the encyclopedia's broad definition of the term literature, information is also included on numerous specialists in their fields, e.g. conductor Bruno Walter and footballer Fritz Walter.

Following the volumes ALiterature and CrimeA (1983, STSL 8) and ACrime NarratedA (1991, STSL 27) the articles assembled here examine discourses serving the social construction of deviation, criminality, and justice/jurisdiction together with typical constellations of the way these have been representeed by the (mass) media in the 20th century. In addition, theoretical articles on the connection between 'transgression' and 'order' on the basis of recent research into the representation of crime and crime-fighting institutions in Germany and the United States are joined by contributions on the criminological, juridical, and political discourses of the present to assist in placing the case studies in their systematic and historical context.