Essays on the Wilhelm Meister novels, Faust, Goethe's early plays, Schiller's Rauber and on Goethe's thought in relation to current debates on cosmopolitanism and postcoloniality. 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. This year's volume features a cluster of exceptional essays thatshed new light on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels and Faust, as well as fascinating articles on the early play Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilen and the poem "Ilmenau," Schiller's Die Rauber, and anessay that places Goethe's thought in relation to current debates about cosmopolitanism and postcoloniality. Engaging reviews of recent publications in Goethe studies round out the volume. Contributors include Eric Denton, Matt Erlin, Jaimey Fisher, Ingrid Rieger, Rainer Kawa, David Barry, Stephanie Dawson, and John Pizer. Simon J. Richter is Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania. Book review editor Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German at Rutgers University.

New, specially commissioned essays on representative works of 19th-century German realism. This volume of new essays by leading scholars treats a representative sampling of German realist prose from the period 1848 to 1900, the period of its dominance of the German literary landscape. It includes essays on familiar, canonical authors -- Stifter, Freytag, Raabe, Fontane, Thomas Mann -- and canonical texts, but also considers writers frequently omitted from traditional literary histories, such as Luise Muhlbach, Friedrich Spielhagen, Louise von Francois, Karl May, and Eugenie Marlitt. The introduction situates German realism in the context of both German literary history and of developments in other European literatures, and surveys the most prominent critical studies of ninteenth-century realism. The essays treat the following topics: Stifter's Brigitta and the lesson of realism; Muhlbach, Ranke, and the truth of historical fiction; regional histories as national history in Freytag's DieAhnen; gender and nation in Louise von Francois's historical fiction; theory, reputation, and the career of Friedrich Spielhagen; Wilhelm Raabe and the German colonial experience; the poetics of work in Freytag, Stifter, andRaabe; Jewish identity in Berthold Auerbach's novels; Eugenie Marlitt's narratives of virtuous desire; the appeal of Karl May in the Wilhelmine Empire; Thomas Mann's portrayal of male-male desire in his early short fiction; and Fontane's Effi Briest and the end of realism. Contributors: Robert C. Holub, Brent O. Petersen, Lynne Tatlock, Thomas C. Fox, Jeffrey L. Sammons, John Pizer, Hans J. Rindisbacher, Irene S. Di Maio, Kirsten Belgum,Nina Berman, Robert Tobin, Russell A. Berman. Todd Kontje is Professor of German at the University of California, San Diego.

The first scholarly book treating the huge amount of recent and contemporary fiction set in the Age of Goethe and employing Goethe and other figures of the period as characters. The Age of Goethe is widely viewed as the apogee of German culture. Its writers and thinkers, especially Goethe, have been exalted as role models for life and art, particularly after 1945. Yet in the 1970s, a new generation of German writers in both East and West rebelled against the postwar hagiography, taking up a tradition of imaginatively engaging with the giants of the period, casting them in major roles in their works in order to critique the nation's past and its present, a tradition that has been carried on by more contemporary writers. This is the first book-length study devoted to modern German "author-as-character" fiction set in the Age of Goethe. It shows for thefirst time in a sustained manner the powerful hold the Goethezeit continues to exercise on the imagination of many of Germany's leading writers. This inner-German dialogue across the ages provides an important corrective to the dominant critical view that contemporary German-language literature is composed primarily under the sign of both globalization and the influence of mass American culture. The book will be of interest to both scholars of theGoethezeit and of contemporary German literature and culture. John D. Pizer is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University.

German Poetic Realists drew on the Romantic motif of the Double in a manner consistent with the central dictum of Poetic Realism as articulated by its chief theorists, Julian Schmidt and Otto Ludwig. Schmidt and Ludwig argued that contemporary authors should, above all, strive for psychological and aesthetic totality in their narrative representations, turning away from the Romantic fantastic but also avoiding the fragmentary approach to the portrayal of everyday life that Ludwig found in early Naturalism. The 'poetic' presentation of reality adheres to quotidian life but strives to show it in all its many dimensions. While Romantic Doppelganger are often preternatural figures, the Poetic Realists configure egos and their narrative Others ('alter egos,' who are also sometimes physical Doubles) to portray characters in their psychological comprehensiveness. After offering an overview of the Romantic Double motif and its connections to the theory of Poetic Realism, John Pizer analyzes the work of Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, Otto Ludwig, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Storm, and Wilhelm Raabe.