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In his popular book The Germans (1982), Stanford historian Gordon Craig remarked: "When German intellectuals at the end of the eighteenth century talked of living in a Frederican age, they were sometimes referring not to the monarch in Sans Souci, but to his namesake, the Berlin bookseller Friedrich Nicolai." Such was the importance attributed to Nicolai’s role in the intellectual life of his age by his own contemporaries. While long neglected by students of the period, who tended to accept the caricature of him as a philistine who failed to recognize Goethe’s genius, Nicolai has experienced a resurgence of interest among scholars reexploring the German Enlightenment and the literary marketplace of the eighteenth century. This book, drawing upon Nicolai’s large unpublished correspondence, rounds out the picture we have of Nicolai already as author and critic by focusing on his roles as bookseller and publisher and as an Aufkärer in the book trade.
In 850 analytical articles, this two-volume set explores the developments that influenced the profound changes in thought and sensibility during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. The Encyclopedia provides readers with a clear, detailed, and accurate reference source on the literature, thought, music, and art of the period, demonstrating the rich interplay of international influences and cross-currents at work; and to explore the many issues raised by the very concepts of Romantic and Romanticism.
The essay reads an Enlightened and modern critique of progress in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte. With numerous references to other operas and texts, and with a storyline that emphasizes inevitable, yet mutable aspects of human nature, Cosi presents an ambivalent picture of the ways in which even the most disinterested and best-informed attitude toward the past can affect the future. At the same time, the opera seems to embrace the notion of freedom of choice without rejecting tradition or repetition. The essay also comments on the performance of Cosi in Zurich in 2000, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who often works with authentic period instruments.
Spectres of the Self is a fascinating study of the rich cultures surrounding the experience of seeing ghosts in England from the Reformation to the twentieth century. Shane McCorristine examines a vast range of primary and secondary sources, showing how ghosts, apparitions, and hallucinations were imagined, experienced, and debated from the pages of fiction to the case reports of the Society for Psychical Research. By analysing a broad range of themes from telepathy and ghost-hunting to the notion of dreaming while awake and the question of why ghosts wore clothes, Dr McCorristine reveals the sheer variety of ideas of ghost seeing in English society and culture. He shows how the issue of ghosts remained dynamic despite the advance of science and secularism and argues that the ghost ultimately represented a spectre of the self, a symbol of the psychological hauntedness of modern experience.
A Poisoned Chalice tells the story of a long-forgotten criminal case: the poisoning of the communion wine in Zurich's main cathedral in 1776. The story is riveting and mysterious, full of bizarre twists and colorful characters--an anti-clerical gravedigger, a hard-drinking drifter, a defrocked minister--who come to life in a series of dramatic criminal trials. But it is also far more than just a good story. In the wider world of German-speaking Europe, writes Jeffrey Freedman, the affair became a cause célèbre, the object of a lively public debate that focused on an issue much on the minds of intellectuals in the age of Enlightenment: the problem of evil. Contemporaries were unable to ascr...
Interrogates the belief that the clergy defined German Catholic reading habits, showing that readers frequently rebelled against their church's rules.
First published in Germany in 1985, Geschichte der deutschen Literaturkritik was quickly recognized as the most original and comprehensive study to date of a proud critical tradition including such giants as Lessing, Goethe, and Heine. Now translated into English, it will serve as a model for a new approach to literary history in America and elsewhere, one emphasizing the connections of criticism with other public discourse. The editor, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, has provided an introduction and a chapter, "Literary Criticism in the Epoch of Liberalism,"translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Filling in the history of German criticism from the Enlightenment to the present are Klaus L. Berghahn of the University of Wisconsin, "From Classicist to Classical Literary Criticism, 1730-1806," translated by John R. Blazek; Jochen Schulte-Sasse, University of Minnesota, "The Concept of Literary Criticism in Romanticism"; Russell A. Berman, Stanford University, "Literary Criticism from Empire to Dictatorship, 1870-1933,"; translated by Simon Srebrny; and Bernhard Zimmerman, University of Tübingen, "Developments in German Literary Criticism from 1933 to the Present," translated by Franz Blaha.
Although Conservative parties did not exist in Germany until after the Napoleonic Wars, there did emerge, around 1770, traceable organized political activity and intellectual currents of a clearly Conservative character. The author argues that this movement developed as a response to the challenge of the Enlightenment in the fields of religion, socioeconomic affairs, and politics- and that this response antedated the impact of the French Revolution. Believing that Conservatism cannot be treated properly as a specialized phenomenon, or simply as an intellectual movement, Professor Epstein correlates it with the political and social forces of the time. Originally published in 1966. The Princet...
The book consists of four studies on the famous Russian writer and historian, who lived from 1766-1826, and his connections with Germany. In 1789 Karamzin did not only visit various German towns and monuments, but also interview philosophers and men of letters like Kant, Nicolai, Herder or Wieland. The episodes from his LETTERS OF A RUSSIAN TRAVELER have been widely dismissed as fictional. However, as this author can show, archival records and even contemporary newspapers prove that Karamzin did not invent anything. On the contrary his epistles turn out to be an invaluable source of knowledge, for instance on the conditions of Russians, temporarily or permanently living at the time in Prussia, in particular Berlin and Potsdam. By a strange twist of history, several of Karamzin's autographs have found their way back to Germany, above all to the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, the very library the young Karamzin had borrowed a volume from more than two centuries before. These papers (aside from an earlier autograph of 1789 in Nurnberg) range from 1806 till 1821 and are commented upon in the last part of the present publication.