The impact of Heinrich von Kleist unfolds between precise depictions and moral extremes. Crystallized in words, his characters appear as paradigms of human fallibility. Their passions and obsessions, their inadequacies and longings are captured in a writing style that reveals its influence even in novels and plays of the twentieth century. This volume takes the literary reception of Kleist as one of its focal points and, furthermore, considers the author's oeuvre and his life on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of his death.

The impact of Heinrich von Kleist unfolds between precise depictions and moral extremes. Crystallized in words, his characters appear as paradigms of human fallibility. Their passions and obsessions, their inadequacies and longings are captured in a writing style that reveals its influence even in novels and plays of the twentieth century. This volume takes the literary reception of Kleist as one of its focal points and, furthermore, considers the author's oeuvre and his life on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of his death.

The works and biography of Heinrich von Kleist have fascinated authors, artists, and philosophers for centuries, and his enduring relevance is evident in the emblematic role he has played for generations. Kleist’s prose works remain “utterly unique” seventy years after Thomas Mann described their singular appeal, his dramas remain “disturbingly current” four decades after E.L. Doctorow characterized their modernity, and twenty-first century readers need not read far before finding the unresolved questions of the current century in Kleist. Heinrich von Kleist: Artistic and Aesthetic Legacies explores examples of Kleist’s impact on artistic creations and aesthetic theory spanning over two centuries of seismic metaphysical crises and nightmare scenarios from Europe to Mexico to Japan to manifestations of the American Dream.

Romanticism is often understood as an age of extremes, yet it also marks the birth of the modern medium in all senses of the word. Engaging with key texts of the romantic period, the book outlines a wide-reaching project to re-imagine the middle as a constitutive principle. Sng argues that Romanticism dislodges such terms as medium, moderation, and mediation from serving as mere self-evident tools that conduct from one pole to another. Instead, they offer a dwelling in and with the middle: an attention to intervals, interstices, and gaps that make these terms central to modern understandings of relation.

The Pathogenesis of Fear gathers together diverse conversations about cultural constructions of the monstrous. Interdisciplinary essays map the margins of monstrosity as follows: the cannibalistic paradox in Kleist’s late-Romantic Penthesilea; intersections of the monstrous-feminine and the new Victorian psycho-physiology of consciousness in George Eliot’s early novels; the monster-formed citizens of Dickensian and later dystopias; the killing of African Americans targeted as monstrous entities in US cities; the post-human anguish of a television zombie-world; the monstrous mutilations of a Spanish horror film; psychosocial aberration in Martin Millar’s werewolf fiction; the demonization of the Other on the war-torn streets of Ireland; Derridean devouring sovereignty. Discursively correlated with different categories of body and mind, monstrosity, these essays argue, persists in taking many forms. Contributors are Elizabeth Hollis Berry, Niculae Gheran, Sarah Harris, Fiona Harris-Ramsby and Mubarak Muhammad, Michaela Marková, Kimberley McMahon Coleman, Judith Rahn, Cindy Smith and Marita Vyrgioti.

An army of Amazons sets out to conquer Greek heroes for the purpose of stocking their women's state with new female offspring. They blast into the midst of the Trojan War, confusing Greeks and Trojans alike and for a moment forcing those enemies into a terrified alliance. When Achilles, the pride and mainstay of the Greeks, and Penthesilea (Pen-te-sil-lay-uh), queen of the Amazons, meet, a chase begins, The like of which not even the wildest storms Set loose to thunder across the plain of heaven Have yet presented to the astonished world, and it is the queen who is hunting Achilles, to the uncomprehending horror of the Greeks. Thus begins a tragedy of love in a world governed by the rules of war, on which "the gods look down but from afar." For the first time, in this splendidly illustrated book, an English translation recreates the audaity, romance, and poetry of one of the strangest and most beautiful works of Western literature.

"In the Beginning was Napoleon"--"Napoleon and no end" Inspiration Bonaparte explores German responses to Bonaparte in literature, philosophy, painting, science, education, music, and film from his rise to the present. Two hundred years after his death, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) continues to resonate as a fascinating, ambivalent, and polarizing figure. Differences of opinion as to whether Bonaparte should be viewed as the executor of the principles of the French Revolution or as the figure who was principally responsible for their corruption are as pronounced today as they were at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Contributing to what had been an uneasy German relationship with the French Revolution, the rise of Bonaparte was accompanied by a pattern of Franco-German hostilities that inspired both enthusiastic support and outraged dissent in the German-speaking states. The fourteen essays that comprise Inspiration Bonaparte examine the mythologization of Napoleon in German literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and explore the significant impact of Napoleonic occupation on a broad range of fields including philosophy, painting, politics, the sciences, education, and film. As the contributions from leading scholars emphasize, the contradictory attitudes toward Bonaparte held by so many prominent German thinkers are a reflection of his enduring status as a figure through whom the trauma of shattered late-Enlightenment expectations of sociopolitical progress and evolving concepts of identity politics is mediated.

Friedrich Schiller is justly celebrated for his dramas and poetry. Yet, above all, he was a polymath, whose writings enriched a range of fields including history and philosophy. Until now, no comprehensive accounting of this philosophy has been undertaken. The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Friedrich Schiller makes good this desideratum, treating Schiller's poetry, prose, and dramatic work alongside his philosophical writings and reviewing his thought not only in connection with those who influenced him, such as Kant, Reinhold, and Fichte, but also those he anticipated, such as Hegel, Marx, and the Neo-Kantians. Topics treated in this volume include Schiller's philosophical background, his theoretical writings, Schiller's philosophical writing in light of his entire oeuvre, and Schiller's philosophical legacy. The Handbook also includes an overview of the main topics Schiller addressed in his philosophical writings including philosophical anthropology, aesthetics, moral philosophy, politics and political theory, the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of education. Bringing together the latest research on Schiller and his thought by leading scholars in the field, the Handbook draws attention to Schiller's undiminished importance for philosophical debates today.

Cutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and his age, featuring in this volume a special section on the poetics of space in the Goethezeit. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 24 features a special section titled "The Poetics of Space in the Goethezeit," co-edited by John Lyon and Elliott Schreiber, with contributions on blind spots in Goethe's Elective Affinities; on the topography and topoi of Goethe's autobiographical childhood; on disorientation and the subterranean in Novalis; on selfhood, sovereignty, and public space in Die italienische Reise and Dichtung und Wahrheit; on Goethe's theater of anamnesis in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; and on spatial mobilization in Kleist's Berliner Abendblätter. There are also articles on the horror of coming home in Caroline de la Motte Fouqué's "Der Abtrünnige" and on Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Eduard Allwills Papiere. Contributors: Colin Benert, Stephanie Galasso, Tove Holmes, Edgar Landgraf, Sara Luly, John B. Lyon, Anthony Mahler, Monika Nenon, Joseph O'Neil, Elliott Schreiber, Inge Stephan, Gabriel Trop, Christian P. Weber. Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German at Stanford. Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California Davis. Book review editor Birgit Tautz is Associate Professor of German at Bowdoin College.