Analyzes the transformation of German-language pastoral from a portrayal of the idyllic lives of herdsmen into a vehicle for the concerns and aspirations of the middle class.

The almost complete disregard of the verse epic as a genre still worthy of meaningful discussion and earnest investigation is all too apparent in German literary criticism. The only attempt to view the genre in its evolution through the centuries is Heinrich Maiworm's valuable but necessarily somewhat perfunctory historical survey of the German epic which appeared in the second volume of Deutsche Philologie im Auf,iss. There is as yet, however, no literary study of the German verse epic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a period which is of particular interest to such a study and indeed crucial to the genre itself, since it was during this period that the novel claimed its final and apparently irrevocable victory over its predecessor, a form which had once been hallowed but was now declared a dead genre. It is not the lack of sufficient material that could explain this neglect, for in terms of sheer quantity and, we believe, not quantity alone, there is enough material for more than one study. The prime purpose of this work, then, is to attempt, if not to fill this conspicuous gap, at least to begin narrowing it somewhat, and in so doing to determine in how far the continuing existence of this vacuum in German literary appreciation is in fact justified.

"The Book of the Epic: The World's Great Epics Told in Story" by H. A. Guerber aims to introduce readers to the greatest epics from around the world. It covers: Greek Epics, Latin Epics, French Epics, Spanish Epics, Portuguese Epics, Italian Epics, Epics of the British Isles, German Epics, Scandinavian Epics, Russian and Finnish Epics, Epics of Central Europe and of the Balkan Peninsula, Hebrew and Early Christian Epics, Arabian and Persian Epics, Indian Epics, Chinese and Japanese Poetry, and American Epics.

The Critical Idyll is a socio-literary re-evaluation of Goethe’s idyllic verse epic, Hermann und Dorothea. The revival of traditional German values as markers of national identity against the approaching revolutionary armies of the French in the early 1790s is analysed in the main figure, the archetypal German youth, Hermann. Confronted by the misery of German refugees from the left-bank territories in 1796, Hermann becomes the spokesman for a new sense of German identity. The refugee Dorothea, and her first finance, the German Jacobin who died in Paris, provide a perspective on the themes of German identity and individual freedom at this time. The national feelings Hermann expresses are based on a language and community in the German small town, rather than on earlier territorial or dynastic concepts of the German nation. The traditional literary form of the idyll is reformed through irony and parody into a modern, critical and self-reflexive work in which central themes of post-revolutionary society are foregrounded.