Daniel Purdy 
Goethe Yearbook 20 

A new crop of essays on topics in the literature of Goethe and the Goethezeit, with a special section providing innovative readings of Goethe’s lyric poetry.


The
Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the
Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world.

Volume 20 contains a special section on Goethe’s lyric poetry with contributions from leading scholars. The essays incorporate a range of new methodologies that provide innovative readings of Goethe’s most important poems, including contributions by Benjamin Bennett on
Faust and Daniel Wilson on the
West-östliche Divan. The volume also includesessays on
Götz von Berlichingen, the Sturm-und-Drang sublime, the
Nibelungenlied’s place within
Weltliteratur, as well as an examination of Schiller’s notion of freedom.


Contributors: Constantin Behler, Benjamin Bennett, Frauke Berndt, Fritz Breithaupt, Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge, Andrew Erwin, Patrick Fortmann, Edgar Landgraf, Horst Lange, Charlotte Lee, Claudia Maienborn, Joseph D. O’Neil, Elizabeth Powers, Christian P. Weber, W. Daniel Wilson.


Daniel Purdy is Associate Professor of German at Pennsylvania State University. Book review editor Catriona Mac Leod is Associate Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania.

Table of Content

Introduction to Special Section on Goethe’s Lyric Poetry

Intimacy, Morality, and the Inner Problematic of the Lyric

Beyond the Poem: Strategies of Meta-Poetic Reflection in Goethe’s
Erster Weimarer Gedichtsammlung

Meistersänger als Beruf: The Maieutics of Poetic Vocation in ‘Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes . . .’

Song or Narration? Goethe’s Mignon

The Sucking Subject: Structural Ambiguities of Goethe’s ‘Auf dem See’ in Literary and Linguistic Perspective

‘Höhere Begattung, ‘ ‘höhere Schönheit’: Goethe’s Homoerotic Poem ‘Selige Sehnsucht’

Poetry after
Faust

Forms of Knowledge/Knowledge of Forms: The Epistemology of Goethe’s
West-östlicher Divan and Cavellian Skepticism

Im flüßgen Element hin und wieder schweifen: Development and Return in Goethe’s Poetry and Hegel’s Philosophy

Goethe’s Historical Particularism and the ‘Right Hand’ of History: Early Modern State Building, Nobility, and the Feud in
Götz von Berlichingen

Where Are the Mountains? Johann Jacob Bodmer and the ‘Pre-Kantian Sublime’

The Politics of Aesthetic Humanism: Schiller’s German Idea of Freedom

Romanticism’s Old German as Stepping-Stone to Goethe’s World Literature

Book Reviews