Originally published in 1929, this book was written to provide an account of the German circle in Copenhagen during the mid-eighteenth century, revealing 'the very real debt which Danish literature and thought owed to the German writers who were in Copenhagen between the years 1740 and 1770'. A bibliography is included and detailed notes are incorporated throughout. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in European literature, literary criticism and comparative literature.
Reveals eighteenth-century German comedies' inherent resistance -- through their depiction of alternative gender roles and sexual behavior -- to the emerging discourse of the sentimental marriage. J. C. Gottsched, who reformed early Enlightenment German theater, claimed for comedy the ability to transform morality. The new literary comedies of the 1740s, among the other moral goals that they pursued, propagated a new sentimental discourse promoting marriage based on love while devaluing its traditional socioeconomic foundations. Yet in comedies by well-known dramatists of the period such as Gottsched, Gellert, J. E. Schlegel, Lessing, and Quistorp, alternative gender roles and sexual behaviors call the primacy of marriage into question: there are women who refuse to be integrated into marriage, episodes of cross-dressing that foreground the culturally constructed aspects ofgender roles, instances of male same-sex desire, and allusions to female same-sex desire. Edward T. Potter examines this marital discourse in close readings of these authors' plays, uncovering the ambiguity of eighteenth-century comedy's stance on marriage and highlighting its resistance to the emerging discourse of the sentimental marriage. In addition to excavating the connections between the texts and norms regarding gender roles and sexual behavior, Potter also examines how these comedies self-reflexively perform their own reception in plays-within-plays that reflect upon early Enlightenment comedy, poetics, and pedagogical aesthetics and thereby comment on the efficacy of theater as a means of propagating such norms. Edward T. Potter is Associate Professor of German at Mississippi State University.
In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar. German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry, yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world. A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.
This work examines the integral role that six female authors played in Schiller's ambitious literary journal, Die Horen (1795-97). Louise Brachmann, Friederike Brun, Amalie von Imhoff, Sophie Mereau, Elisa von der Recke, and Caroline von Wolzogen helped put the journal back on track when it floundered fiscally and programmatically and their literary contributions were among the most successful the journal ever received. Beyond a critical discussion of the women's publications in Schiller's journal, this work addresses the range of problems associated with women's writing and publishing during the late eighteenth century, the aesthetics of Weimar Classicism, Schiller, and to a lesser degree, Goethe, as patrons, and the interprettation of literary history.
