Schmid shows how reception processes work across linguistic, national, and cultural boundaries, taking the English Romantic poet Shelley's German reception as a case study. It also highlights Anglo-German literary and cultural relations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and supplies a theoretical framework for further analysis.

Crossing Cultures brings together scholars in the field of reception and translation studies to chart the individual and institutional agencies that determined the reception of Anglophone authors in the Dutch and Belgian literary fields in the course of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The essays offer a variety of angles from which nineteenth-century literary dynamics in the Low Countries can be studied. The first two parts discuss the reception of Anglophone literature in the Netherlands and Belgium, respectively, while the third part focuses exclusively on the Dutch translation of women writers.

The widespread and culturally significant impact of Percy Bysshe Shelley's writings in Europe constitutes a particularly interesting case for a reception study because of the variety of responses they evoked. If radical readers cherished the 'red' Shelley, others favoured the lyrical poet, whose work was, like Byron's, anthologized and set to music. His major dramatic works, The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound, inspired numerous fin-de-siècle and expressionist dramatists and producers from Paris to Moscow. Shelley was read by, and influenced, the novelist Stendhal, the political theorist Engels, the Spanish symbolist Jiménez, and the Russian modernist poet Akhmatova. This exciting collection of essays by an international team of leading scholars considers translations, critical and biographical reviews, fictionalizations of his life, and other creative responses. It probes into transnational cross-currents to demonstrate the depth of Shelley's impact on European culture since his death in 1822. It will be an indispensable research resource for academics, critics, and writers with interests in Romanticism and its legacies.