Before unification, Germany was a loose collection of variously sovereign principalities, nurtured on deep thought, fine music and hard rye bread. It was known across Europe for the plentiful supply of consorts to be found among its abundant royalty, but the language and culture was largely incomprehensible to those outside its lands. In the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries- between the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 and unification under Bismarck in 1871 - Germany became the land of philosophers, poets, writers and composers. This particularly German cultural movement was able to survive the avalanche of Napoleonic conquest and exploitation and its impact was gradually felt far beyond Germany's borders. In this book, Roderick Cavaliero provides a fascinating overview of Germany's cultural zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He considers the work of Germany's own artistic exports - the literature of Goethe and Grimm, the music of Wagner, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Bach and the philosophy of Schiller and Kant - as well as the impact of Germany on foreign visitors from Coleridge to Thackeray and from Byron to Disraeli. Providing a comprehensive and highly-readable account of Germany's cultural life from Frederick the Great to Bismarck, 'Genius, Power and Magic' is fascinating reading for anyone interested in European history and cultural history.

Vernon Lee, born Violet Paget in 1856 to English parents who lived on the Continent, bridged two worlds and many cultures. She was a Victorian by birth but lived into the second quarter of the twentieth century. Her chosen home was Italy, but she spent part of every year in England, where she published over the years an impressive number of books: novels, short stories, travel essays, studies of Italian art and music, psychological aesthetics, polemics. She was widely recognized as a woman of letters and moved freely in major literary and social circles, meeting and at times having close friendships with a huge number of the major writers and intellectuals of her time, among them Robert Browning, Walter Pater, Henry James, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Bernard Berenson, and Mario Praz. Although she never committed herself to one program of political activism, she was an advocate for feminism and social reform and during World War I was an ardent pacifist. In her last years she watched with dismay the emergence of fascism. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography recovers this crowded and intellectually eventful life from her previously unpublished letters and journals, as well as from her books themselves. Vineta Colby also explores Lee’s troubled personal life, from her childhood in an eccentric expatriate family to her several unhappy love affairs with women to her frank recognition that her work, brilliant as some of it was, remained unappreciated. Through it all, Vernon Lee clung to her faith in the life of the mind, and through Colby’s engaging biographical narrative, she emerges today as a writer worthy of renewed attention and admiration. Victorian Literature and Culture Series