The book will be of interest to students of autobiography and life writing as well as specialists in Romantic literature and Anglo-German literary relations. The book includes sections on Robinson and nineteenth-century autobiography, on the different stages of Robinson's five years in Germany, including his initial stay in Frankfurt; his personal friendships and first meeting with literary lions; his days as a Jena student and aspiring "literator"; his contacts with Weimar; and his role as a philosophical informant for Mme de Stael on her visit there; his return to England and the failure of his hopes of achieving the professional literary career that he had dreamed about in Germany. --Book Jacket.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

'[The text] significantly expands upon the [existing] body of scholarship to argue persuasively that Crabb Robinson was the most important pioneering comparatist during the Romantic period. [...] Hunnekuhl‟s tightly-woven monograph opens the door for further inquiry into other areas of Robinson‟s early reading, writing and social interactions. [...] Future scholarship in these and other areas in the early life of one of the most important diarists and commentators on British life and thought in the nineteenth century will now be able to build upon the solid foundation laid by Philipp Hunnekuhl.' Timothy Whelan, The Coleridge Bulletin

The tradition of the German novel, before the emergence of its 'classic' writers in the first half of the twentieth century does not have an assured place in the canon of European literature. The one signal exception is Goethe's novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers