Regarding philosophical importance, Edmund Husserl is arguably "the" German export of the early twentieth century. In the wake of the linguistic turn(s) of the humanities, however, his claim to return to the "Sachen selbst" became metonymic for the neglect of language in Western philosophy. This view has been particularly influential in post-structural literary theory, which has never ceased to attack the supposed "logophobie" of phenomenology. "Phenomenology to the Letter. Husserl and Literature" challenges this verdict regarding the poetological and logical implications of Husserl's work through a thorough re-examination of his writing in the context of literary theory, classical rhetoric, and modern art. At issue is an approach to phenomenology and literature that does not merely coordinate the two discourses but explores their mutual implication. Contributions to the volume attend to the interplay between phenomenology and literature (both fiction and poetry), experience and language, as well as images and embodiment. The volume is the first of its kind to chart a phenomenological approach to literature and literary approach to phenomenology. As such it stands poised to make a novel contribution to literary studies and philosophy.

The work of the decidedly philosophical poet Friedrich Holderlin has gained renewed urgency in its emphasis on the forces of nature that produce life and at the same time threaten to devour it. This volume brings Holderlin into dialogue with pre-Socratic and German Idealist thought as well as contemporary environmental theory to show the continued relevance of the poet's understanding of natural catastrophes. With twelve original contributions on Holderlin's poetry by noted scholars including Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Achim Geisenhansluke, Anja Lemke, Jan Mieszkowski, Katrin Pahl and Thomas Schestag, the book explores Holderlin's legacy and what it reveals about the impulses toward form and formlessness in nature and the role that poetry plays in fashioning a musical accord, or what Holderlin called 'harmonious opposition'.

Pseudo-Memoirs redefines the notion of fiction itself, a form that has all too often been understood in terms of its capacity to produce a seeming reality. Rochelle Tobias argues that the verisimilitude of the novel derives not from its object but from the subjectivity at its base. What generates the plausibility of fiction is not the referentiality of its depictions but the intentionality of consciousness. Edmund Husserl developed the idea that consciousness is always intentional in the sense that it is directed outside itself toward something that it does not find so much as it constitutes as an object. Pseudo-memoirs reveal the full implications of this position in their double structure as the tale of their own telling or the fiction of life-writing. In so doing they reveal how the world of fiction is constructed, but more important they bring to the fore the idealist premises that fuel the novel and guarantee its truth, even when it remains an invention of the imagination. Rochelle Tobias explores novels by Thomas Mann, Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and W. G. Sebald in conjunction with philosophical and theoretical texts by Rene Descartes, Husserl, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gyoergy Lukacs, Roland Barthes, and Maurice Blanchot.

In our age of climate change, the work of the decidedly philosophical poet Friedrich Hoelderlin has gained renewed urgency with its emphasis on the forces of nature that produce life and at the same time threaten to devour it. At the heart of his work lies an understanding of nature and the role that consciousness plays within it. This responds to, but also revises, the concerns of 18th and 19th-century philosophy of nature. This collection of 15 essays by distinguished international scholars reconsiders what his work reveals about the impulses toward form and formlessness in nature and the role that poetry plays in creating Holderlin's 'harmonious opposition'. The collection shows that Hoelderlin anticipates many of the concerns that motivate contemporary environmental thinking.