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"This meticulously prepared edition makes a significant contribution to the study of Romantic and Victorian literature and culture by providing, for the first time, a reliable and fully annotated text of some of Carlyle’s most important and influential literary critical writing. The two books represent a major editorial achievement and an indispensable resource for future scholarship on nineteenth-century Anglo-German literary contact and cultural exchange."—Tim Sommer, Lecturer in English Literature and Culture, University of Passau, and author of Carlyle, Emerson and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority: Literature, Print, Performance
List of contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Chronology of Carlyle’s Life
Introduction
Note on the Text
Essays on German Literature
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again.
Luther’s Psalm.
Schiller.
Taylor’s Historic Survey of German Poetry.
The Nibelungen Lied.
German Literature of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.
Goethe’s Portrait.
Death of Goethe.
Goethe’s Works.
Varnhagen von Ense’s Memoirs.
Notes
Works Cited
Textual Apparatus
Emendations of the Copy-Text
Discussion of Editorial Decisions
Line-End Hyphens in the Copy-Text
Line-End Hyphens in the Present Text
Historical Collation
Index
About the author
Chris R. Vanden Bossche is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of Carlyle and the Search for Authority and Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832–1867 and editor of several volumes in this series of editions of Carlyle’s works.
Paul E. Kerry, Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University, has published a monograph on Goethe and edited books on Carlyle, Schiller, and Franklin. He is a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford’s Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Government.
Marylu Hill is a full teaching professor in the Augustine and Culture Seminar Program at Villanova University. Her publications include "A Tale of a Table: Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and the Legacy of Thomas Carlyle" and Mothering Modernity: Feminism, Modernism, and the Maternal Muse.
Summary
In the early 1820s, the acclaimed Victorian philosopher, social critic, and essayist Thomas Carlyle achieved a level of expertise in German language and literature that prompted editors to seek him out as a reviewer and launched his career as an essayist. Carlyle has long been credited with establishing the importance of new German writing in Britain at the time, and Essays on German Literature and Culture brings together his complete writings on the topic. This volume will be published in two parts. The essays in part 2 include historical overviews of German literature from the Middle Ages to the present and a series of commentaries marking the passing of Goethe.
In keeping with the Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, these essays are accompanied by a thorough historical introduction to the material, extensive notes providing historical and cultural context while expanding on references and allusions, and a textual apparatus that carefully details and explains the editorial decisions made in reconciling the editions of each essay.
