This book investigates the emergence of the modern concept of zeitgeist, the notion of a pervasive contemporary coherence, in the late 18th century. It traces zeitgeist’s descent from genius saeculi and investigates its association with public spirit and public opinion before surveying its prominence around the Wars of Liberation in Germany and during the politically restless 1820s in England. This trajectory shows that zeitgeist emerged from the 18th-century discourses about culture and the public functioning of social collectives. Under the impact of the French Revolution the term came to describe social processes of political and cultural challenge. Zeitgeist was discussed as a social dynamic in which emerging elites disseminate new ideas which find enough public approval to influence cultural and political behaviour and practice. These findings modify the view that zeitgeist eludes critical grasp and is mainly invoked for manipulative purposes by showing that the zeitgeist discussions around 1800 contributed to the formation of modern politics and capture key aspects of how ideas are disseminated within societies and across borders, providing a way of reading history horizontally.
It’s 1999, and in the Turkish half of Cyprus, the ever-enterprising Leggy Starlitz has alighted — pausing on his mission to storm the Third World with the G-7 girls, the cheapest, phoniest all-girl rock group ever to wear Wonderbras and spandex. His market is staring him in the face: millions of teenagers trapped in a world of mullahs and mosques, all ready to blow their pocket change on G-7’s massive merchandising campaign — and to wildly anticipate music the band will never release. Leggy’s brilliant plan means doing business with some of the world’s most dangerous people. Among these thieves, schemers, and killers, he must act quickly and decisively. Y2K is just around the corner — and the only rule to live by is that the whole scheme stops before the year 2000. But Leggy’s G-7 Zeitgeist is in serious jeopardy, for in Istanbul his former partners are getting restless — and the G-7 girls are beginning to die.... From the Paperback edition.
Writing Time shows how serial literature based in journals and anthologies shaped the awareness of time at a transformative moment in the European literary and political landscapes. Sean Franzel explores how German-speaking authors and editors "write time" both by writing about time and by mapping time itself through specific literary formats. Through case studies of such writers as F. J. Bertuch, K. A. Böttinger, J. W. Goethe, Ludwig Börne, and Heinrich Heine, Franzel analyzes how serial writing predicated on open-ended continuation becomes a privileged mode of social commentary and literary entertainment and provides readers with an ongoing "history" of the present, or Zeitgeschichte. Drawing from media theory and periodical studies as well as from Reinhart Koselleck's work on processes of temporalization and "untimely" models of historical time, Writing Time presents "smaller" literary forms—the urban tableau, cultural reportage, and caricature—as new ways of imagining temporal unfolding, recentering periodicals and other serial forms at the heart of nineteenth-century print culture.
Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867) earned his place in literary history as a perceptive diarist from 1811 onwards. Drawing substantially on hitherto unpublished manuscript sources, this book discusses his formal and informal engagement with a wide variety of English and European literature prior to this point. Robinson emerges as a pioneering literary critic whose unique philosophical erudition underpinned his activity as a cross-cultural disseminator of literature during the early Romantic period. A Dissenter barred from the English universities, Robinson educated himself thoroughly during his teenage years and began to publish in radical journals. Godwin's philosophy subsequently inspired his first theory of literature. When in Germany from 1800 to 1805, he became the leading British scholar of Kant, whose philosophy informed his discussions of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and August Wilhelm Schlegel. After his return to London, Robinson aided Hazlitt's understanding of Kant and, thus, Hazlitt's early career as a writer. His distinctive comparative criticism further enabled him to draw compelling parallels between Wordsworth, Blake, and Herder, and to discern 'moral excellence' in Christian Leberecht Heyne's Amathonte. This also prompted Robinson's transmission of Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul in 1811, as well as a profound exchange of ideas with Coleridge. In this new study, Philipp Hunnekuhl finds that Robinson's ingenious adaptation of Kantian aesthetic autonomy into a revolutionary theory of literature's moral relevance anticipated the current 'ethical turn' in literary studies.
The question of whether Britain is "apart from or a part of Europe" (D. Abulafia) has gained significance in recent years. This book reassesses an underexplored field of early modern transnational history: the variety of ways in which connections between Britain and German-speaking Europe shaped developments. After a comprehensive introduction, this book is divided into three parts: cross-border transfers and appropriations of knowledge; coping with alterity in intergovernmental contacts; and ideologising the cultural nation. The topics range from the exchange of religious and political ideas over court life, diplomacy, and espionage to literary and philosophical debates. Particular attention is paid to the media processes involved and to the practical value of knowledge about the "other" in different historical contexts. The picture emerging from the case studies reveals an intriguing dynamic: Mutual interest and ambiguous entanglements deepened precisely at a time when the British and German worlds diverged evermore from each other in terms of social and political structures. This fascinating volume sheds new light on Anglo-German relations and will be essential reading for students of early modern European history.
‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’. This original edited volume takes William Blake’s aphorism as a basis to explore how British Romantic literature creates its own sense of time. It considers Romantic poetry as embedded in and reflecting on the march of time, regarding it not merely as a reaction to the course of events between the late-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, but also as a form of creative engagement with history in the making. The authors offer a comprehensive overview of the question of time from a literary perspective, applying a diverse range of critical approaches to Romantic authors from William Blake and Percy Shelley to John Clare and Samuel Rodgers. Close readings uncover fresh insights into these authors and their works, including Frankenstein, the most familiar of Romantic texts. Revising current thinking about periodisation, the authors explore how the Romantic poetics of time bears witness to the ruptures and dislocations at work within chronological time. They consider an array of topics, such as ecological time, futurity, operatic time, or the a-temporality of Venice. As well as surveying the Romantic canon’s evolution over time, these essays approach it as a phenomenon unfolding across national borders. Romantic authors are compared with American or European counterparts including Beethoven, Irving, Nietzsche and Beckett. Romanticism and Time will be of great value to literary scholars and students working in Romantic Studies. It will be of further interest to philosophers and historians working on the connections between philosophy, history and literature during the nineteenth century.
This important contribution to the sociolinguistics of Asian languages breaks new ground in the study of language standards and standardization in two key ways: in its focus on Asia, with particular attention paid to China and its neighbours, and in the attention paid to multilingual contexts. The chapters address various kinds of (sometimes hidden) multilingualism and examine the interactions between multilingualism and language standardization, offering a corrective to earlier work on standardization, which has tended to assume a monolingual nation state and monolingual individuals. Taken together, the chapters in this book thus add to our understanding of the ways in which multilingualism is implicated in language standardization, as well as the impact of language standards on multilingualism. The introduction, Chapter 6 and Chapter 8 are free to download as open access publications. You can access them here: Introduction: https://zenodo.org/record/5749388#.YaiwuNDP3cs Chapter 6: https://zenodo.org/record/5749522#.Yaiw-9DP3cs Chapter 8: https://zenodo.org/record/5749586#.Yai0RNDP3cs
Politics in the Roman Republic rewrites the field’s modern historiographical narrative through critical re-examinations of four foundational historians: Barthold Niebuhr, Theodor Mommsen, Friedrich Münzer, and Matthias Gelzer. Each chapter traces these scholars’ impact and offers novel (re)interpretations of their enduring frameworks, conceptual and methodological alike.
A new Forum section focuses on the impact of Digital Humanities on Goethe scholarship and on eighteenth-century German Studies, alongside articles on a diverse range of authors and topics.The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, showcasing North American and international scholarship on Goethe and other authors and aspects of the Goethezeit. Volume 27 features the yearbook''s first Forum, a discussion of the impact of Digital Humanities (DH) and "computational criticism" on Goethe scholarship and eighteenth-century German Studies more broadly. For this launch, invited contributors were askedto consider the canon in comparison to "the great unread" (Margaret Cohen): the vast expanse of uncanonized texts. The contributions evince approaches that go beyond the established binary of scholarly methods vs. data sciences; they also explore DH as a way of navigating the gendered fault lines of canon formation. Beyond the Forum, there are articles on Goethe''s self-marketing, on several of his major works, and on pivotal topics in them (orientation, der Gang, and transgression); on nascent anthropology, on Creativity Studies, and on other eighteenth-century figures (Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Phillip Moritz). A newly discovered text by August von Kotzebue, sample entries fromthe prodigious work in progress Lexikon of Philosophical Concepts, and the customary book review section round out the volume. Richard B. Apgar, Constanze Baum, Jane K. Brown, Matt Erlin, Renata Fuchs, Matthew Handelman, Katrin Henzel, Stefan Höppner, Julie Koser, James Manalad, Clark Muenzer, Maike Oergel, Andrew Piper, Mattias Pirholt, Michael Saman, Renata Schellenberg, Helmut J. Schneider, Oliver Simons, Leif Weatherby, George S. Williamson, Karin A. Wurst. Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Birgit Tautz is George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College. Book review editor Sean Franzel is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Columbia.al of his major works, and on pivotal topics in them (orientation, der Gang, and transgression); on nascent anthropology, on Creativity Studies, and on other eighteenth-century figures (Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Phillip Moritz). A newly discovered text by August von Kotzebue, sample entries fromthe prodigious work in progress Lexikon of Philosophical Concepts, and the customary book review section round out the volume. Richard B. Apgar, Constanze Baum, Jane K. Brown, Matt Erlin, Renata Fuchs, Matthew Handelman, Katrin Henzel, Stefan Höppner, Julie Koser, James Manalad, Clark Muenzer, Maike Oergel, Andrew Piper, Mattias Pirholt, Michael Saman, Renata Schellenberg, Helmut J. Schneider, Oliver Simons, Leif Weatherby, George S. Williamson, Karin A. Wurst. Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Birgit Tautz is George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College. Book review editor Sean Franzel is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Columbia.issouri-Columbia.al of his major works, and on pivotal topics in them (orientation, der Gang, and transgression); on nascent anthropology, on Creativity Studies, and on other eighteenth-century figures (Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Phillip Moritz). A newly discovered text by August von Kotzebue, sample entries fromthe prodigious work in progress Lexikon of Philosophical Concepts, and the customary book review section round out the volume. Richard B. Apgar, Constanze Baum, Jane K. Brown, Matt Erlin, Renata Fuchs, Matthew Handelman, Katrin Henzel, Stefan Höppner, Julie Koser, James Manalad, Clark Muenzer, Maike Oergel, Andrew Piper, Mattias Pirholt, Michael Saman, Renata Schellenberg, Helmut J. Schneider, Oliver Simons, Leif Weatherby, George S. Williamson, Karin A. Wurst. Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Birgit Tautz is George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College. Book review editor Sean Franzel is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Columbia.al of his major works, and on pivotal topics in them (orientation, der Gang, and transgression); on nascent anthropology, on Creativity Studies, and on other eighteenth-century figures (Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Phillip Moritz). A newly discovered text by August von Kotzebue, sample entries fromthe prodigious work in progress Lexikon of Philosophical Concepts, and the customary book review section round out the volume. Richard B. Apgar, Constanze Baum, Jane K. Brown, Matt Erlin, Renata Fuchs, Matthew Handelman, Katrin Henzel, Stefan Höppner, Julie Koser, James Manalad, Clark Muenzer, Maike Oergel, Andrew Piper, Mattias Pirholt, Michael Saman, Renata Schellenberg, Helmut J. Schneider, Oliver Simons, Leif Weatherby, George S. Williamson, Karin A. Wurst. Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Birgit Tautz is George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College. Book review editor Sean Franzel is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Columbia.issouri-Columbia.issouri-Columbia.al of his major works, and on pivotal topics in them (orientation, der Gang, and transgression); on nascent anthropology, on Creativity Studies, and on other eighteenth-century figures (Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Phillip Moritz). A newly discovered text by August von Kotzebue, sample entries fromthe prodigious work in progress Lexikon of Philosophical Concepts, and the customary book review section round out the volume. Richard B. Apgar, Constanze Baum, Jane K. Brown, Matt Erlin, Renata Fuchs, Matthew Handelman, Katrin Henzel, Stefan Höppner, Julie Koser, James Manalad, Clark Muenzer, Maike Oergel, Andrew Piper, Mattias Pirholt, Michael Saman, Renata Schellenberg, Helmut J. Schneider, Oliver Simons, Leif Weatherby, George S. Williamson, Karin A. Wurst. Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Birgit Tautz is George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College. Book review editor Sean Franzel is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Columbia.issouri-Columbia.e University of Missouri-Columbia.issouri-Columbia.
