Editors' Preface

With the publication of volume 27, we would like to take the opportunity to address some innovations. In this volume, we introduce an array of new formats through which we pursue research on Goethe, his age, and the long eighteenth century and seek to encourage new modes of collaboration, including, perhaps, communication across several volumes.

A range of articles that contribute to the rich and growing archive of scholarship on German eighteenth-century studies opens this issue. Helmut J. Schneider's article, based on a keynote address at the 2017 Atkins Goethe Conference, "Re-Orientations around Goethe," highlights the eighteenth-century genesis of the bourgeois subject's unitary experience of the natural world. With select readings of Goethean texts, Schneider explores the disjuncture that opens between the gaze and the corporeal. Moreover, Schneider's reading captures the destructive consequences of the emancipatory escape into nature for anthropocentric moments of modernity. The remaining articles, while devoted to discreet subjects, authors, and texts, invite fascinating cross-readings. Oliver Simons turns our attention to the representation of Werther's narrative pulse. Herder and Lessing also figure in the framework for this interpretation of metanarrative reflections on suicide and acts of ending; the essay extends the narratological focus of a special section in last year's volume (What is an Event?). The two following articles—a fascinating, opportune pairing—redirect our attention to Karl Philipp Moritz, through texts that engage with but go beyond the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde. Richard Apgar explores the fraught process of subject formation through an examination of Moritz's writing on the individual, "Erinnerungen aus den frühesten Jahren der Kindheit" (memories from the earliest years of childhood). This interrogation of impressions and mediated memories leads to fresh insights into the construction of the modern individual. Mattias Pirholt continues the focus on Moritz in his analysis of ethical and aesthetic principles encompassed by the concept of disinterested love in "Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten." The remaining contributions in this first section take up a challenge that our subfield has latently faced, namely to engage overtly or covertly with issues of relevancy; together the articles show how modern Goethe and his contemporaries are in our dialogues on belonging and identities, cultural legacies, and interdisciplinary inquiry. Renata Schellenberg turns our attention to the uncanny correspondence between Goethe's portrayal of refugee reception in Hermann und Dorothea, foregrounding parallels to contemporary discussions and politics of statelessness, citizenship, and national belonging. Issues of intersectional identities also appear in Renata Fuchs's contribution on Rahel Levin Varnhagen's epistolary and dialogical engagement with Goethe. Despite her centrality as salon host and vibrant intellectual, Levin Varnhagen's reception was challenged by her outsider status as a woman and as a Jew. Stefan Höppner's article on Goethe's personal library invites a reconsideration of the shift from legal inheritance to cultural heritage. Michael Saman interprets three Goethean texts as keen observations of human ritual that offer prefatory ethnographic studies that impact structuralist anthropology. Karin Wurst approaches the intellectual hub of Weimar through the lens of contemporary creativity theory. These interventions demonstrate the continued, if underestimated, relevance of eighteenth-century studies for the study of humanities in the present, as well as sustained and innovative engagement with the literature of the Goethezeit.

This volume launches our first Forum, a section comprised of invited contributions on an important topic of debate in the profession. For the debut, we asked colleagues engaged in Digital Humanities research to consider the canon in comparison to "the great unread" (Margaret Cohen): a vast expanse of noncanonical texts. The contributions evince approaches that go beyond the established binary of scholarly methods vs. data sciences; they also explore Digital Humanities as a way of navigating the gendered fault lines of canon formation to expand on the process, more generally, of canonization vs. marginalization in literary studies. We hope that readers of the Goethe Yearbook will be inspired to take up some of the questions, perspectives, and challenges introduced here, and that they will suggest further forum topics for...