The influence of foreign cultures on German literature and other cultural productions since the 18th century. The Edinburgh German Yearbook is devoted to German Studies in an international context. It publishes original English- and German-language contributions on a wide range of topics from scholars around the world. Each volumeis based on a single broad theme: the first includes papers from the highly successful conference Kennst du das Land: Cultural Exchange in German Literature, held in Edinburgh in December 2006, supplemented by additional essays. The conviction that German culture and the German spirit are triumphantly unique has played a notorious role in Germany's history. It is nonetheless acknowledged that German literature has been significantly influenced by non-German sources, and the search for what is unique about Germany and German literature must incorporate an awareness of these. This volume provides a wide-ranging investigation into how German literature from the 18th century tothe present day reflects interactions between German and non-German cultures. Alongside theoretical and historical reflections on the nature of cultural exchange, contributions explore literary reception, the boundaries of and movement between cultures, and Germany's literary, political, cultural, and religious relations with both near neighbors and far-flung cultural interlocutors. Contributoers: Christian Moser, Birgit Tautz, Silvia Horsch, Eleoma Joshua, Gauti Kristmannsson, Sabine Wilke, Daniela Krämer, Jon Hughes, Thomas Martinec, Margaret Litter, Lyn Marven, Dirk Göttsche, Susanne Kord Eleoma Joshua is Lecturer in German at Edinburgh University. RobertVilain is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. The journal's General Editor is Sarah Colvin, Professor of German at Edinburgh University.

Through innovative interdisciplinary methodologies and fresh avenues of inquiry, the nine essays collected in A Peculiar Mixture endeavor to transform how we understand the bewildering multiplicity and complexity that characterized the experience of German-speaking people in the middle colonies. They explore how the various cultural expressions of German speakers helped them bridge regional, religious, and denominational divides and eventually find a way to partake in America’s emerging national identity. Instead of thinking about early American culture and literature as evolving continuously as a singular entity, the contributions to this volume conceive of it as an ever-shifting and tangled “web of contact zones.” They present a society with a plurality of different native and colonial cultures interacting not only with one another but also with cultures and traditions from outside the colonies, in a “peculiar mixture” of Old World practices and New World influences. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Rosalind J. Beiler, Patrick M. Erben, Cynthia G. Falk, Marie Basile McDaniel, Philip Otterness, Liam Riordan, Matthias Schönhofer, and Marianne S. Wokeck.

Focusing on particular cases of Anglo-German exchange in the period known as the Sattelzeit (1750-1850), this volume of essays explores how drama and poetry played a central role in the development of British and German literary cultures. With increased numbers of people studying foreign languages, engaging in translation work, and traveling between Britain and Germany, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave rise to unprecedented opportunities for intercultural encounters and transnational dialogues. While most research on Anglo-German exchange has focused on the novel, this volume seeks to reposition drama and poetry within discourses of national identity, intercultural transfer, and World Literature. The essays in the collection cohere in affirming the significance of poetry and drama as literary forms that shaped German and British cultures in the period. The essays also consider the nuanced movement of texts and ideas across genres and cultures, the formation and reception of poetic personae, and the place of illustration in cross-cultural, textual exchange.

In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar. German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry, yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world. A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.

An account of fraught and complex cross-cultural literary exchange between two highly distinct - even uniquely opposed - reading contexts, Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural Cold War. Working from the extraordinary records of the East German publishing and censorship regime, the authors materially track the production and reception of one country’s corpus as envisioned by another. The 90 Australian titles published in the GDR form an alternative canon, revealing a shadowy literary archive that rewrites Australia’s postwar cultural history from behind the iron curtain and illuminates multiple ironies for the GDR as a ‘reading nation’. This book brings together leading German and Australian scholars in the fields of book history, German and Australian cultural history, Australian and postcolonial literatures, and postcolonial and cross-cultural theory, with emerging writers currently navigating between the two cultures.

In 1930, when Rabindranath Tagore met Paul and Edith Geheeb in Germany, they formed a fruitful and long-term association resulting in the exchange of ideas and vision. Tagore's Brahmacharya Ashram, founded in 1901 in Shantiniketan, and the Geheeb's Odenwaldschule, established in Germany in 1910 (thereafter the Ecole d'Humanité in Switzerland, established in 1934 after the couple fled Nazi Germany), emerged from vastly different cultural backgrounds and social exigencies. Yet, they recognized striking similarities between their educational endeavours. The meeting also initiated a close association between India and Germany, with the Geheebs attracting many Indian intellectuals and Indophile Germans to their schools. This book explores the areas where the lives of the Geheebs and Tagore, and their respective circles, overlap. Rather than being a biography, a history, or a comprehensive description, this study is a comparison of Tagore and the Geheebs and their schools. Making use of the repository of unpublished correspondence available at the Ecole's archive, the author studies the Indo-German cultural exchanges in the early twentieth century that were initiated by these three educators and their pedagogical vision.

Uncovers the central role of Brecht reception in Turkish theater and Turkish-German literature, examining interactions between Turkish and German writers, texts, and contexts.