Fur Leibniz standen China und Europa in unterschiedlichen Bereichen auf der gleichen kulturellen bzw. zivilisatorischen Stufe. In der Gegenwart pragen trotz Postkolonialismus und Globalisierung (die auch koloniale Elemente hat) Krisenhaftigkeit, Asymmetrie und Ungleichzeitigkeit die gegenseitigen Annaherungen und Veranderungen. Die Beitrage des Bandes erforschen zentrale europaisch-chinesische Debatten und Fragestellungen: Sprache, Literatur und Kultur, Wissenschaftstraditionen, Rechtsauffassungen, wirtschaftliche, soziale und politische Konstellationen, Werte und philosophische Grundlagen.. Es wird gezeigt, wie Missverstandnisse entstehen und was, neben den sozialen, kulturellen und sprachlichen Differenzen, dafur verantwortlich ist. Bei den Rechtskonzepten zeigen sich im Kulturvergleich uberraschende Einsichten in das hoechst komplexe chinesische Rechtssystem. Auch die Thematisierung der universitaren und wissenschaftlichen Zusammenarbeit tragt dazu bei, dass die Beitrage des Bandes auch Perspektiven einer kunftigen chinesisch-deutschen Zusammenarbeit vorstellen.

The Romantic mode and representations of emotion would seem to be a perfect fit. By focusing on the esthetics of emotions, their genre-typical enactments and representation in the works of Arnim, Gunderrode, Goethe, Heine, Hoffmann, Schiller, Tieck and others, the book presents a broad-based examination of this interaction. The articles in this volume examine how the literature of the Romantic deals with or represents emotions."

Around 1800 there is a new symbolisation and narration of a ~internal spacesa (TM), spiritual and psychic processes, states or relationships which do not lend themselves to direct observation. This volume focuses on the narrated a ~reala (TM) spaces of Romanticism; it deals with the cultural encoding of houses and rooms, castles and towers, but also of open spaces a " the vastness of the sea, riverscapes and distant lands. The analyses are to be understood as a contribution within the currently proclaimed spatial or topographical turn to a new dimensioning of a complex of central importance for both narrative and representational techniques and for cultural anthropology.

The fifth colloquium of the International Arnim Society in Heidelberg (2004) revolved around the imminent 200th anniversary of the publication of ADes Knaben WunderhornA in 2006. For Heidelberg romanticism and for Volkspoesie in general, issues concerned with performance, the relationship between the oral and the written, citation, and intertextuality have always been central concerns. Alongside other works by Arnim and the Heidelberg romantics discussed here, Arnim and Brentano's ADes Knaben WunderhornA is an especially grateful subject for the discussion of these issues. Goethe himself stressed the performative aspect: ABy right, this little book should be found in every house where fresh-minded people live, on the window-sill, under the mirror, or wherever hymn-books and cook-books normally lie, to be opened whenever the mood (good or bad) should take us, and we are in search of something like-minded or stimulating.A

The third colloquium of the International Arnim Society situates Achim von Arnim in the political, culture-political, and literary context of Prussia in the 1810-1820 period. The profusion of literary and journalistic production justifies regarding Arnim's Berlin years (1809-1814) as the zenith of his career. Political and educational issues are addressed alongside the specifically 'Romantic' context of Arnim's Berlin period (Berlin art, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, Kleist, Eichendorff, Tieck). The volume closes with three emphatically text-analytic studies on Arnim and Brentano and the discussion of a surprising reading of Arnim's 'Wunderhorn' by Rahel Levin.

The articles in this volume live up to their declared aim to squarely approach the works of Jeremias Gotthelf (1797-1854) from the perspective of literary scholarship. They take an international angle on aesthetic, genre typological, theological, political and socio-historical aspects of his oeuvre. Outdated and erroneous verdicts are refuted, Gotthelf is regarded against the aesthetic and cultural-historical backdrop of his age and compared with other European authors. The major insight gleaned from this is that his work is not merely the expression of an effort to contribute to the popular education and the politics of his day but can stand as the literary achievement of a major realistic narrator. The volume rounds off with a bibliography and detailed indexes of persons, works and subjects.

River and stream as images of time and fate are as ancient as spring and stream as metaphors of inspiration and song. Processes of crossing and dissolving boundaries, of transmission and exchange are visualised in different images of fluidity. At the sixth Colloquium of the International Arnim Society held in Burg SchAnburg (Oberwesel), the participants discussed this complex of images and metaphors, from the flowing Rhine via cash flows to the flow of a text and energy flows in the body a " using too the context of a oeRomantic Sciencea . Novalisa (TM) conception of poetry as a oeby its nature fluida is opposed by Goethea (TM)s lines a oeWater drawn by bards whosefame /Pure is, may be roundeda .

At the fourth colloquium of the international Arnim Society in Glasgow, the central issues were biographical and national identity, culture- and socio-political codification, and marginalization and communality. Alongside comparative studies concentrating on intertextuality, there were also a number of interdisciplinary contributions largely concerned with the historical, political, social, and cultural contexts. Among the Romantics, the crisis occasioned by the Napoleonic wars strengthened the recourse to their own literary traditions and the highly problematic (from a 20th century viewpoint) reception accorded to those traditions. Experience of other cultures (Arnim's image of England, Jews and gypsies in Arnim's works) differentiated the formation of identity on the national, communitarian, and individual plane. There is also discussion of the reasons for a shift to aesthetic identifications (as opposed to philosophical and/or political alternatives). Other case studies are devoted to the narrative construction of artistic, social, amicable, and gender-based identity.