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  • The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism
  • Arnd Bohm (bio)
Nicholas Saul, ed. The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xx+336pp. US$80 (hb). ISBN 978-0-521-84891-6.

Different eras feature different publishing fashions. Right now, the simultaneous collapse of monograph publishing and the shift of scholarly journals to theme issues has been matched by the rise of series such as the one represented by the Cambridge University Press Companion to volumes. Focused on famous writers or on selected topics, the books have a respected editor and a collection of individual contributions, which together provide an overview, primarily for those seeking quick yet reliable information. Somewhere between reference works and special journal numbers, the volumes have the advantage of being timely and authoritative. Individual experts can find time for an article when they are often too busy to undertake a book-length study of a subject they know quite well.

These advantages are displayed by this Companion. Nicholas Saul is an established scholar and an experienced editor, so one immediately has confidence in the project. All sixteen contributors have published on various aspects of German literature and bring an impressive background of learning to bear, more than one person could easily claim and certainly not express so succinctly. Libraries and readers will from the outset be virtually guaranteed good value for their money and time.

The range of the contributions complicates matters for a reviewer. Thus, of the sixteen articles, less than half will be of much direct interest to Eighteenth-Century Fiction readers, which does not mean that they are therefore slight. However, only Anthony Phelan’s “Prose Fiction of the German Romantics” (41–65) is clearly worth recommending here. Phelan has faced a difficult challenge with masterful aplomb. As everyone who has attempted to bring order into the view of German Romantic prose knows, it can be quite a tangle. Phelan’s headings — Goethe, the early Romantics, later Romantics, and shorter forms (Novelle, Erzählung, Märchen) — may seem idiosyncratic, but they accurately reflect the state of things. Phelan concentrates on canonical texts such as Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde, Ludwig Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, Dorothea Schlegel’s Florentin, and Friedrich von Hardenberg’s Die Lehrlinge zu Sais and his Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Clemens Brentano’s Godwi, oder das steinerne Bild der Mutter, and Joseph von Eichendorff ’s Ahnung und Gegenwart. Perhaps with the exception of E.T.A. Hoffmann, these writers are little more than names to the Anglo-American literary world. This is regrettable, especially when the qualities associated with what Phelan calls “radical experimentation” remain cut off from the discourse on English prose texts. The article concludes with notes and with a brief list of further readings, one that does justice to American and British scholarly contributions. [End Page 231]

Several other contributions emphasize the prose of the German Romantics. John McCarthy offers a keen look at “Forms and Objectives of Romantic Criticism” (101–18), reminding how important criticism was in the work of German theorists at the time. Useful overviews are Jane K. Brown, “Romanticism and Classicism” (119–31); Gesa Dane, “Women Writers and Romanticism” (133–46); Nicholas Saul, “Love, Death, and Liebestod in German Romanticism” (163–74); Andrew Bowie, “Romantic Philosophy and Religion” (175–90); Ethel Matala de Mazza, “Romantic Politics and Society” (191–207); and Jürgen Barkhoff, “Romantic Science and Psychology” (209–25). Richard Littlejohns on painters and Andrew Bowie on music can barely scratch the surfaces of their respective large areas. Ricarda Schmidt deals with “early to late Romanticism,” Charlie Louth with lyric, and Roger Paulin with drama, each with good success.

Two contributions were disappointing despite the claims of their announced titles. Azade Seyhan’s “What Is Romanticism and Where Did It Come from?” opens the volume with a review of familiar arguments that do not find bridges to current work on histories of epistemology. Similarly, Carl Niekerk’s “The Romantics and Other Cultures” operates with a rather mundane concept of culture. In contrast, the closing review of Romantic scholarship and the Romantic presence by Margarete Kohlenbach, “Transformations of German Romanticism 1830–2000” (257–80), is stimulating as well as...

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