The twenty-volume edition of The German Classics: Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English was edited by Kuno Francke of Harvard (1855-1930), the most prestigious professor of German in America at the time. While it bears the imprint dates 1913 and 1914, it was not completed until mid-1915, just in time for the submarine sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania in May of that year. The edition was publicized with great fanfare and was well received at first, but with the outbreak of the European war in 1914 and the entry of the United States into it in 1917, American sentiment turned against all things German. The reviews became hostile; the edition was nearly pulped; its publisher went bankrupt; and Francke felt obliged to resign his Harvard professorship. Kuno Francke's Edition of The German Classics (1913-15) describes the origins of the edition; recounts the careers of the editors and some fifty professional contributors; seeks to identify approximately 115 translators; and comments on the nearly 500 illustrations, mostly German art of the nineteenth century. This book also introduces the selections from the 114 featured authors, almost a third of whom were still alive at the time of publication, and evaluates the critical commentary. The edition emerges from the study as a laboratory of the high prestige of German literature and culture in the United States before it fell into permanent decline at the time of World War I.

The Gothic Ideology argues that in order to modernize and secularize, the British Protestant imaginary needed an 'other' against which it could define itself as a culture and a nation with distinct boundaries. The 'Gothic ideology' is identified as an intense religious anxiety, produced by the aftershocks of the Protestant reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the dynastic upheavals produced by both events in England, Germany, and France, and was played out in hundreds of Gothic texts published throughout Europe between the mid-eighteenth century and 1880. This book is the first to read the Gothic ideology through the historical context of both King Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and the extensive French anti-clerical and pornographic works that were well-known to Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis. The book argues that Gothic was thoroughly invested in a crude form of anti-Catholicism that fed lower class prejudices against the passage of a variety of Catholic Relief Acts that had been pending in Parliament since 1788 and finally passed in 1829.

Designed to provide English readers of German literature the opportunity to familiarize themselves with both the established canon and newly emerging literatures that reflect the concerns of women and ethnic minorities, the Encyclopedia of German Literature includes more than 500 entries on writers, individual work, and topics essential to an understanding of this rich literary tradition. Drawing on the expertise of an international group of experts, the essays in the encyclopedia reflect developments of the latest scholarship in German literature, culture, and history and society. In addition to the essays, author entries include biographies and works lists; and works entries provide information about first editions, selected critical editions, and English-language translations. All entries conclude with a list of further readings.