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New, specially commissioned essays providing an in-depth scholarly introduction to the great thinker of the European Enlightenment. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is one of the great names of the classical age of German literature. One of the last universalists, he wrote on aesthetics, literary history and theory, historiography, anthropology, psychology, education, and theology; translated and adapted poetry from ancient Greek, English, Italian, even from Persian and Arabic; collected folk songs from around the world; and pioneered a better understanding of non-European cultures.A student of Kant's, he became Goethe's mentor in Strasbourg, and was a mastermind of the Sturm und Drang and a luminary of classical Weimar. But the wide range of Herder's interests and writings, along with his unorthodox ways of seeing things, seems to have prevented him being fully appreciated for any of them. His image has also been clouded by association with political ideologies, the proponents of which ignored the message of Humanität in histexts. So although Herder is acknowledged by scholars to be one of the great thinkers of European Enlightenment, there is no up-to-date, comprehensive introduction to his works in English, a lacuna this book fills with seventeennew, specially commissioned essays. Contributors: Hans Adler, Wulf Koepke, Steven Martinson, Marion Heinz and Heinrich Clairmont, John Zammito, Jürgen Trabant, Stefan Greif, Ulrich Gaier, Karl Menges, Christoph Bultmann, Martin Keßler, Arnd Bohm, Gerhard Sauder, Robert E. Norton, Harro Müller-Michaels, Günter Arnold, Kurt Kloocke, and Ernest A. Menze. Hans Adler is Halls-Bascom Professor of Modern Literature Studies at the Universityof Wisconsin-Madison. Wulf Koepke is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German, Texas A&M University and recipient of the Medal of the International J. G. Herder Society.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1955.

This is the first comprehensive study of Herder's preoccupation with the Song of Songs, Baildam considers the importance of this poetry in his thinking, and examines his commentaries and translations of 1776 and 1778. Despite Herder's claims to the contrary, his own cultural position is revealed in his translations, and in his unique interpretation of the work as the voice of pure, paradisal love. Starting with Herder's interest in the Song of Songs between 1765 and 1778, this book sets his reflections in the wider context of his relativistic views on the nature of poetry, contemporary German culture, and the importance of primitive poetry in general and the poetry of the Bible in particular. Then Baildam looks at current literary critical theories with implications for Herder's translations of these 'Lieder der Liebe', and discusses Herder's theories of language and translation in comparison with German translation theories. Herder's reading of the Song as the most primitive, natural and sublime example of Hebrew poetry is placed in the context of earlier and contemporary interpretations, his opinion of which is examined. In the last part of the book, there is an appraisal first of Herder's commentaries themselves, analysing how the details reflect his overall concept of the work, and then of his translations, comparing them with each other, with the Lutheran text to which Herder ultimately directed his readership, and with the Hebrew text. A concluding chapter reviews the reception of Herder's work, and three appendices offer a parallel presentation of Herder's translations of 1776 and 1778, Luther's translation of 1545, and Goethe's translation of 1775.

Exploring the link between German biblical interpretation and anti-Semitism, this book is a fresh, comprehensive study of leading German exegetes, concluding that although Nazism brought anti-Semitic exegesis to a head, age-old thought structures provided powerful legitimation for oppression.