John Van Cleve analyzes the influence of the merchant class on what Leo Balet termed the Verburgerlichung (the 'becoming middle-class') of German literature during the eighteenth century. He describes the origins and development of the class and examines its successive images in works by Haller, Schnabel, Borkenstein, Luise Gottsched, J. E. Schlegel, Gellert, and Lessing. Between the years 1729 and 1750, merchants were better able to lend financial support to the literary world than were civil servants and professionals. Although merchants were central in the cultural life of the German states, they were usually less educated than other members of their social stratum and therefore less disposed to literature. Tradition has cast the merchant class in a highly unflattering light as ethically indefensible. Van Cleve's in-depth analysis traces the evolution of attitudes toward merchants from negative, underdeveloped images to positive, heroic portrayals.

Although the importance of the interplay of literature and philosophy in Germany has often been examined within individual works or groups of works by particular authors, little research has been undertaken into the broader dialogue of German literature and philosophy as a whole. Philosophy and German Literature 1700–1990 offers six chapters by leading specialists on the dialogue between the work of German literary writers and philosophers through their works. The volume shows that German literature, far from being the mouthpiece of a dour philosophical culture dominated by the great names of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger and Habermas, has much more to offer: while possessing a high affinity with philosophy it explores regions of human insight and experience beyond philosophy's ken.

Attempts to present a coherent account of early modern German history are often hampered by the German equivalent of the Whig theory of history, by which all useful roads lead up to the creation of the nineteenth-century power state (Machstaat) or institutional state (Anstalstaat). In this kind of historiography, there are large "blank" areas between the "important" events like the Reformation, the Thiry Years War, the Seven Years War, and the French Revolution. During the intervals of apparent stagnation between these events, "Germany" seems to disappear, to be replaced by states such as Prussian and Austria, Saxony, Bavaria, and the Palatinate. Substantial areas are ignored, and groups such as the parliamentary Estates, which stood in the way of state-building, are virtually written out of most accounts. Rather than focusing on the separate histories of the individual German states, Michael Hughes looks to the structure of the Holy Roman Empire in its final centuries and writes an account of Germany as a functioning, federative state, with institutions capable of reform and modernization. For nineteenth-and twentieth-century historians, the Empire was seen as the embodiment of division and weakness. But by examining the first Reich, Hughes reveals the persistence of the idea of Germanness and German national feeling during a period when, according to most accounts, Germany had virtually ceased to exist. At the same time, he examines "the element of continuity in Germany's development . . . in an attempt to discover how far back in Germany's past it is necessary to go to find the roots of the 'German problem,' the Germans' search for a political expression of their strongly developed awareness of cultural unity."

John Van Cleve analyzes the influence of the merchant class on what Leo Balet termed the Verburgerlichung (the 'becoming middle-class') of German literature during the eighteenth century. He describes the origins and development of the class and examines its successive images in works by Haller, Schnabel, Borkenstein, Luise Gottsched, J. E. Schlegel, Gellert, and Lessing. Between the years 1729 and 1750, merchants were better able to lend financial support to the literary world than were civil servants and professionals. Although merchants were central in the cultural life of the German states, they were usually less educated than other members of their social stratum and therefore less disposed to literature. Tradition has cast the merchant class in a highly unflattering light as ethically indefensible. Van Cleve's in-depth analysis traces the evolution of attitudes toward merchants from negative, underdeveloped images to positive, heroic portrayals.

From the series examining the development of music in specific places during particular times, this book looks at the classical period, in Europe and America, from Vienna and Salzburg to the Iberian courts and Philadelphia.

This study examines North Germany during the transformative era of the French Revolution, Napoleonic occupation, and Wars of Liberation; it reveals international exploitation, military occupation, economic destruction of the city-state Hamburg as well as the republic’s liberation and post-Napoleonic autonomy.

German writers, from Luther and Goethe to Heine, Brecht, and Günter Grass, have had a profound influence on the modern world. This Very Short Introduction presents an engrossing tour of the course of German literature from the late Middle Ages to the present, focussing especially on the last 250 years. Emphasizing the economic and religious context of many masterpieces of German literature, it highlights how they can be interpreted as responses to social and political changes within an often violent and tragic history. The result is a new and clear perspective which illuminates the power of German literature and the German intellectual tradition, and its impact on the wider cultural world. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The ambiguities and transitional structures in that early modern world have contributed to the inconsistencies that are part of Bach's legacy." "The essays are complemented by statements (never before translated) about Lutheran church music by two of Bach's close contemporaries, Gottfried Ephraim Scheibel and Johann Kuhnau."--Jacket.

Though the field of book history has long been divided into discrete national histories, books have seldom been as respectful of national borders as the historians who study them—least of all in the age of Enlightenment when French books reached readers throughout Europe. In this erudite and engagingly written study, Jeffrey Freedman examines one of the most important axes of the transnational book trade in Enlightenment Europe: the circulation of French books between France and the German-speaking lands. Focusing on the critical role of book dealers as cultural intermediaries, he follows French books through each stage of their journey—from the French-language printing shops where they were produced, to the wholesale book fairs in Leipzig, to retail book shops at locations scattered widely throughout Germany. At some of those locations, authorities reacted with alarm to the spread of French books, burning works of the radical French Enlightenment and punishing the booksellers who sold them. But officials had little power to curtail their circulation: the political fragmentation of the German lands made it virtually impossible to police the book trade. Largely unimpeded by censorship, French books circulated more freely in Germany than in the absolutist monarchy of France. In comparison, the flow of German books into the French market was negligible—an asymmetry that corresponded to the hierarchy of languages in Enlightenment Europe. But publishers in Switzerland produced French translations of German books. By means of title changes, creative editing, and mendacious advertising, the Swiss publishers adapted works of the German Enlightenment for an audience of French-readers that stretched from Dublin to Moscow. An innovative contribution to both the history of the book and the transnational study of the Enlightenment, Freedman's work tells a story of crucial importance to understanding the circulation of texts in an age in which the concept of World Literature had not yet been invented, but the phenomenon already existed.

Sociologist Robert Wuthnow notes remarkable similarities in the social conditions surrounding three of the greatest challenges to the status quo in the development of modern society--the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the rise of Marxist socialism.