Teaching a foreign language and culture is always a challenge, but it has been especially problematic to teach the German language and culture in the United States in the twentieth century. The tradition of Germany's great poets and thinkers of the past has been joined by a starker legacy. Through explorations of such topics as the world wars, the Holocaust, women in the language-teaching profession, Jewish contributions, and technology's impact on scholarship, this volume inspects the fascination and frustrating relationships of the two cultures as they interact through the teaching of German in American educational systems--from small liberal arts colleges to large and famous universities. This volume resulted from a conference, "Shaping Forces in American Germanics," held in Madison, Wisconsin in September 1996.

Essays presented at a conference held in Madison, Wis., in April 2009 during observances of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"No narrow work. [The authors] have made signal contributions both to the history of higher education in the United States and to the intellectual history of the Middle West. In short, this is a distinguished history of a distinguished university."--Saturday Review of Literature

The extensive scope of this collection means that this documentary record of the reception of German literature in England is a valuable scholarly resource. One of the most important features of British literary and intellectual history over the past 250 years is the influence of German literature. From the second half of the 18th Century, through the first decades of the 19th, German books and ideas attracted, then gained the attention of a nation. Despite the acknowledged importance of the influence on writers such as Coleridge and Carlyle the subject, though often alluded to, was rarely studied. This collection provides a guidebook through the masses of periodical and allows the English side of the Anglo-German literary relationship to be explored in detail. In order to make the collection useful to scholars with a wide range of interest, it has been divided into three parts: Part 1 is a chronological presentation of commentary on German literature in general. It also contains collective reviews of multiple German authors, notices of important anthologies and reactions to influential works about Germany and its culture. Part 2 collects reviews of 18th Century individual German authors and Part 3 is devoted to the English reception of Goethe and Schiller. Parts 2 & 3 contain cross-references to the collective reviews of Part 1. Containing over 200 British serials and articles and reviews from all the major English literary periodicals, the collection also includes a broad sampling of opinion from the more general magazines, including some popular religious publications.