University This elegant collection of essays ranges across eighteenth and nineteenth-century thought, covering philosophy, science, literature and religion in the ‘Age of Goethe.’ A recognised ...authority in the field, Nisbet grapples with the major voices of the Enlightenment and gives pride of place to the figures of Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller. The book ranges widely in its compass of thought and intellectual discourse, dealing incisively with themes including the philosophical implications of literature and the relationship between religion, science and politics. The result is an accomplished reflection on German thought, but also on its rebirth, as Nisbet argues for the relevance of these Enlightenment thinkers for the readers of today. The first half of this collection focuses predominantly on eighteenth-century thought, where names like Lessing, Goethe and Herder, but also Locke and Voltaire, feature. The second has a wider chronological scope, discussing authors such as Winckelmann and Schiller, while branching out from discussions of religion, philosophy and literature to explore the sciences. Issues of biology, early environmentalism, and natural history also form part of this volume. The collection concludes with an examination of changing atitudes towards art in the atfermath of the ‘Age of Goethe.’ The essays in this volume are brought together in this collection to present Nisbet’s widely-acclaimed perspectives on this fascinating period of German thought. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the intellectual life of Europe during the Enlightenment, while its engaging and lucid style will also appeal to the general reader.
Far from being a forerunner of Weimar Classicism or an addendum to the Enlightenment, the Sturm und Drang is best seen as part of an autonomous culture of impatience—as literature in which Germans, ...frustrated with their fragmented land, simulated a sense of power and effectiveness that political realities did not afford. This impatience drove not only authors and the characters they created; it also drew in German audiences and readers ready to partake vicariously in national sentiments that they otherwise could not have experienced.
Alan Leidner sees Lavater's work as a model for dealing with a limiting culture, Goethe's Werther as a subtly arrogant figure, the drama of the Kraftmensch as a literature legitimizing the violence of its protagonists, the famous split in the Urfaust as the result of Goethe's resistance to the impatience that led many writers to fabricate a German nation that did not exist, and Schiller's Die Räuber as a liberating ritual that allowed German audiences to enjoy temporary feelings of national community. He concludes his study with an analysis of J. M. R. Lenz, whose texts recoil unequivocally in the face of the impatient muse.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Germany's bourgeois elites became enthralled by the civilization of Renaissance Italy. As their own country entered a phase of critical socioeconomic ...changes, German historians and writers reinvented the Italian Renaissance as the onset of a heroic modernity: a glorious dawn that ushered in an age of secular individualism, imbued with ruthless vitality and a neo-pagan zest for beauty. The Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination is the first comprehensive account of the debates that shaped the German idea of the Renaissance in the seven decades following Jacob Burckhardt's seminal study of 1860. Based on a wealth of archival material and enhanced by more than a hundred illustrations, it provides a new perspective on the historical thought of Imperial and Weimar Germany and the formation of a concept that is still with us today.
Since 1963 the series Patristische Texte und Studien has been publishing research findings coordinated by the Patristics Commission, which today is a joint venture of all the German Academies. The ...series is presenting editions, commentaries and monographs on the writings and teachings of the Church Fathers.
In this ambitious book, Kirk Wetters traces the genealogy of the demonic in German literature from its imbrications in Goethe to its varying legacies in the work of essential authors, both canonical ...and less well known, such as Gundolf, Spengler, Benjamin, Lukács, and Doderer. Wetters focuses especially on the philological and metaphorological resonances of the demonic from its core formations through its appropriations in the tumultuous twentieth century. Propelled by equal parts theoretical and historical acumen, Wetters explores the ways in which the question of the demonic has been employed to multiple theoretical, literary, and historico-political ends. He thereby produces an intellectual history that will be consequential both to scholars of German literature and to comparatists.
Der Schwerpunkt des Kommentars zu Philipp von Zesens Coelum astronomico- poeticum (1662) liegt auf dem Nachweis der über 3000 Zitate und Verweise. Dabei werden nicht nur die Stellen dokumentiert, auf ...die der Text verweist, sondern auch die Quellen, aus denen Zesen jeweils schöpft. Auf diese Weise entsteht ein exemplarisches Bild der kompilatorischen Arbeitstechnik, die charakteristisch für einen großen Teil der gelehrten Literatur jener Zeit ist.
Linked to propaganda and the dissemination of informations about colonies, German colonial literature played a very active part in the media campaign for German colonization. The colonial discourse ...developed by this literature incited the Germans to immigrate to the colony. Therefore, the colonial space became for colonial writers the object of the construction of a diversified knowledge allowing the reading of the relationship of the Self to the Other. This can be verified by the German colonial writer Alfred Mansfeld. From 1904 to 1907, he was assigned as regional manager of the German colonial administration in Cameroon. On the basis of a sample of ethnographic data, he collected many observations on the lives of the colonized and documented them in detail in his travel texts. From his travel writing Urwald-Dokumente: vier Jahre unter den Crossflussnegern Kamerun (1908), we propose, in this contribution, to show how the narrator-character construct diverse knowledge’s about Cameroon. At the end of our analyzes, we will come to the conclusion that the colonial novel, as exotic literary genre, often worked by the concepts of ethnocentrism, cultural hegemony and overhanging gaze, seems to be a vector of interculturality in a colonial situation.
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