Who Is This Schiller Now?: Essays on His Reception and Significance (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture, 99) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1571134883 ISBN 13: 9781571134882

Publisher: Camden House, 2011

Synopsis

The works of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) -- an innovative and resonant tragedian and an important poet, essayist, historian, and aesthetic theorist -- are among the best known of German and world literature. Schiller's explosive original artistry and feel for timely and enduring personal tragedy embedded in timeless sociohistorical conflicts remain the topic of lively academic debate. The essays in this volume address the many flashpoints and canonical shifts in the cyclically polarized reception of Schiller and his works, in pursuit of historical and contemporary answers to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's expression of frightened admiration in 1794: "Who is this Schiller?" The responses demonstrate pronounced shifts from widespread twentieth-century understandings of Schiller: the overwhelming emphasis here is on Schiller the cosmopolitan realist, and little or no trace is left of the ultimately untenable view of Schiller as an abstract idealist who turned his back on politics. Contributors: Ehrhard Bahr, Matthew Bell, Frederick Burwick, Jennifer Driscoll Colosimo, Bernd Fischer, Gail K. Hart, Fritz Heuer, Hans H. Hiebel, Jeffrey L. High, Walter Hinderer, Paul E. Kerry, Erik B. Knoedler, Elisabeth Krimmer, Maria del Rosario Acosta López, Laura Anna Macor, Dennis F. Mahoney, Nicholas Martin, John A. McCarthy, Yvonne Nilges, Norbert Oellers, Peter Pabisch, David Pugh, T. J. Reed, Wolfgang Riedel, Jörg Robert, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Henrik Sponsel. Jeffrey L. High is Associate Professor of German Studies at California State University Long Beach, Nicholas Martin is Reader in European Intellectual History at the University of Birmingham, and Norbert Oellers is Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of Bonn.

About this title

About the Author:

Jeffrey L. High is Associate Professor of German Studies at California State University Long Beach, Nicholas Martin is Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and Norbert Oellers is Professor emeritus at the University of Bonn.

Review:

(D)emands attention not least for the great variety of approaches chosen by its well-qualified contributors, all of whom share the common aim of liberating Schiller from his traditional role as the junior member of the Weimar partnership. . . . (T)he bulk of the constituent material gives us a Schiller still vibrantly alive -- now, and in the foreseeable future. --Osman Durrani, MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW (A)n indispensable introduction to Schiller scholarship: it presents historicized research covering a broad range of Schiller's legacy, is extensively resourced, and demonstrates considerable self-reflexivity regarding international Germanistik. GOETHE YEARBOOK (A) rich, varied, and rewarding volume of scholarship. . . . (B)oth specialists and more casual readers of Schiller's works, and indeed those readers with an interest in the history of ideas, stand to benefit from a sustained reading of the learned meditations contained within it. FOCUS ON GERMAN STUDIES (T)he premise of the book's conception (is) fully to be accepted, and finds realization in a number of important contributions that broaden and deepen our knowledge about Schiller's illusionless realism, his understanding of politics, his philosophical position, his critique of religion, and his skeptical treatment of historical experience in his poetic and theoretical works. GERMANISTIKBR> Divided into five parts covering drama and poetry, aesthetics and philosophy, history and politics, reception and "Schiller Now", the essays reveal Schiller as a dramatist of melancholy, a "poet of Mourning", and an Enlightenment historian, to mention just three of the wide variety of perspectives offered . . . (a) useful contemporary collection. Recommended. CHOICE (P)ositions itself - rightly - over and against the mid-century creation of a politically naïve, if not dangerous, Schiller, who cartoonishly embodied the backlash within Anglo-American circles against German politics and German idealism. . . . (T)his collection is a conscious effort not only to avoid reducing Schiller to any of his readily identifiable personae, but also to interrogate the twentieth-century scholarly trends that have made this reduction something that must be avoided. GERMAN QUARTERLY

About this edition

• Publisher: Camden House
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1571134883
• ISBN 13: 9781571134882
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 512
• Editor: High Jeffrey L., Martin Nicholas, Oellers Norbert