"The two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was celebrated in Scotland by a colloquium held under the auspices of the University of Glasgow's Centre for Intercultural Germanistics in April 1999. Its aim was to reflect both Goethe's own commitment to Weltliteratur and the pressing need in our global village at the turn of the millennium for cultural exchange between scholars of different nations. For if, as Goethe said, 'wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weis nichts von seiner eigenen', then it is also true that 'wer fremde Kulturen nicht kennt; weis nichts von seiner eigenen'.Discussing different themes, different texts, and working with different methodological presuppositions, the papers in this collection nevertheless share the conviction that the significance of Goethe for the new millennium can best be shown by setting his works in an intercultural context. The volume also includes John Michael Krois' Inaugural Ernst Cassirer Lecture in Intercultural Relations, held in the University of Glasgow in April 2000, entitled 'Ernst Cassirer and the Renaissance of Cultural Theory'."

This anthology represents the first sustained feminist examination of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century German women writers in English. These essays highlight the literature produced by German women in the period 1790-1810, framing the discussions with a comparative orientation. The book analyzes in culturally specific detail how these authors came to constitute the first generation of writing women in Germany at a time when Goethe set the standard for literary production. Each essay focuses on the ambivalence of the author(s) toward literary and social models. The authors treated include Rahel Varnhagen, Charlotte von Stein, Friederike Helene Unger, Bettine von Arnim, Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Sophie Albrecht, Therese Huber, Sophie Mereau, Sophie von La Roche, Henriette Frolich, and Benedikte Naubert.

Das Lessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch 2020 enthält Beiträge zu Lessings Aristoteles-Lektüre, zum Drama "Philotas" im Kontext des Siebenjährigen Krieges, zum Spiel-Begriff und zur Toleranz-Thematik in "Nathan der Weise", zu Lessings nachgelassenen Blättern zu "Nathan" und zur Rezeption von Lessings Dramen in Amsterdam. Außerdem enthält der Band Aufsätze zur Gefühlsthematik in Joachim Wilhelm von Brawes Drama "Der Freygeist", zur Rolle des Apostels Thomas in Klopstocks "Messias" und zur kognitiven Narratologie in Karl Philipp Moritz "Reisen eines Deutschen in England". Abschließend bietet der Band einen Tagungsbericht zur digitalen Erarbeitung der Texte Lessings.

From the New York Times review of the Dallas Opera's performance of Orlando furioso and the international symposium on Baroque opera: ". . . it was a serious, thoughtful, consistent and imaginative realization of a beautiful, long-neglected work, one that fully deserved all the loving attention it received. As such, the production and its attendant symposium made a positive contribution to the cause of Baroque opera . . . . " Baroque opera experienced a revival in the late twentieth century. Its popularity, however, has given rise to a number of perplexing and exciting questions regarding literary sources, librettos, theater design, set design, stage movement, and costumes—even the editing of the operas. In 1980, the Dallas Opera produced the American premier of Vivaldi's Orlando furioso, which met with much acclaim. Concurrently an international symposium on the subject of Baroque opera was held at Southern Methodist University. Authorities from around the world met to discuss the operatic works of Vivaldi, Handel, and other Baroque composers as well as the characteristics of the genre. Michael Collins and Elise Kirk, deputy chair and chair of the symposium, edited the papers to produce this groundbreaking study, which will be of great interest to music scholars and opera lovers throughout the world. Contributors to Opera and Vivaldi include Shirley Wynne, John Walter Hill, Andrew Porter, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Howard Mayer Brown, William Holmes, Ellen Rosand, and the editors.

This book is the first study of the development of German opera in northern Germany from the first comic operas of Johann Adam Hiller at Leipzig in 1766 to the end of the century. Intellectually and historically, the period witnessed the flowering of the German stage and German letters. German opera was an inseparable part of the new aspirations of the German stage during the Enlightenment. Thomas Bauman stresses the vital role of the mixed repertories of German companies in effecting changes in the genre. North German opera began as a basically literary genre. It then changed dramatically in response to two major trends: first, the contact with the serious elements and styles of tragedy and secondly, the triumph on German stages of Italian, French, and Viennese comic operas. The book is generously illustrated with music examples. There is also a complete catalogue of texts of North German opera: those composed for performance and unset published librettos both cross-indexed under the librettists' names.

In 1767, more than a century before Germany was incorporated as a modern nation-state, the city of Hamburg chartered the first Deutsches Nationaltheater. What can it have meant for a German playhouse to have been a national theater, and what did that imply about the way these theaters operated? Michael Sosulski contends that the idea of German nationhood not only existed prior to the Napoleonic Wars but was decisive in shaping cultural production in the last third of the eighteenth century, operating not on the level of popular consciousness but instead within representational practices and institutions. Grounding his study in a Foucauldian understanding of emergent technologies of the self, Sosulski connects the increasing performance of body discipline by professional actors, soldiers, and schoolchildren to the growing interest in German national identity. The idea of a German cultural nation gradually emerged as a conceptual force through the work of an influential series of literary intellectuals and advocates of a national theater, including G. E. Lessing and Friedrich Schiller. Sosulski combines fresh readings of canonical and lesser-known dramas, with analysis of eighteenth-century theories of nationhood and evolving acting theories, to show that the very lack of a strong national consciousness in the late eighteenth century actually spurred the emergence of the German Nationaltheater, which were conceived in the spirit of the Enlightenment as educational institutions. Since for Germans, nationality was a performed identity, theater emerged as an ideal space in which to imagine that nation.