Band 50 des Lessing Jahrbuchs ist ein Sonderband zum Thema "Die Aufklärung und die Geschichte der Natur" und enthält Beiträge zu Lessings kritischer Auseinandersetzung mit den Naturvorstellungen seiner Zeit: Lessing und Mylius` Natur-Konzept; Naturvorstellungen in der biblischen Dichtung des 18. Jahrhunderts; Pflanzen und Emotionen bei Buffon, Linnaeus und Humboldt; Sophie von La Roches "Erscheinungen am See Oneida"; Herders Kritik des teleologischen Historizismus Kants; Andreas Riems Klima-Theorie, und Goethes Wissenschaft der Natur.

The group volume distinguishes itself by its multidisciplinary, comparative approach and by the network of relationships it weaves between the various European languages and cultures. The study takes shape from its different viewpoints and in its diverse contexts, to chart a detailed historical-conceptual map of the basic role theater played in forging the modern European consciousness. The thematic core of ‘theatermania’ lay in the authentic theatrical passion that manifested itself in different ways from one country to another throughout the 18th century. While the aesthetic, social and political value of theater took a variety of forms, its central feature was the privileged place it gave to collective and individual social revolutions, phenomena that could be defined as upheavals of the collective imagination, which found in theater a source of nourishment, mediation or control. The volume offers not just a series of historical-theatrical studies, but a view of history that foregrounds the passions that were regularly sparked by theater. It adds an essential feature to the profile of the century that redefined the role and importance of theater, and that led to its full re-evaluation in the Romantic age.

Includes indexes to editorial personnel, languages, sponsoring organizations and subjects.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.

Being a historian of Germany and of the German-Jews in modern times, the author has written numerous essays on the history and historiography of Antisemitism in this country. Some of them are rather well-known, such as the essay on "Antisemitism as a Cultural Code", and others were printed in peripheral journals and Festschrifts or were never published in English. Since the phenomenon of Jew-hating is now once again an issue discussed by scholars and non-scholars alike, both in Europe and in the United States, and especially since it now arouses particular interest in the context of the Palestinian fight against Israel, it seems timely to re-publish these essays in a slightly revised form, and attach to them an extended introduction as well as a follow-up essay at the end, updating old notions, reformulating some and adding commentary on controversies that are being conducted today regarding the term Antisemitism, its various contexts and the phenomenon it signifies. Freshly looking at Antisemitism in Germany before, during and after National-Socialism seems to be needed at this point in time.

The Aesthetics of Kinship intervenes critically into rigidified discourses about the emergence of the nuclear family and the corresponding interior subject in the eighteenth century. By focusing on kinship constellations instead of “family plots” in seminal literary works of the period, this book presents an alternative view of the eighteenth-century literary social world and its concomitant ideologies. Whereas Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy and political theory posit the nuclear family as a microcosm for the ideal modern nation-state, literature of the period offers a far more heterogeneous image of kinship structures, one that includes members of various classes and is not defined by blood. Through a radical re-reading of the multifarious kinship structures represented in literature of the long eighteenth century, The Aesthetics of Kinship questions the inevitability of the dialectic of the Enlightenment and invokes alternative futures for conceptions of social and political life.

In a new approach to Goethe's Faust I, Evanghelia Stead extensively discusses Moritz Retzsch's twenty-six outline prints (1816) and how their spin-offs made the unfathomable play available to larger reader communities through copying and extensive distribution circuits, including bespoke gifts. The images amply transformed as they travelled throughout Europe and overseas, revealing differences between countries and cultures but also their pliability and resilience whenever remediated. This interdisciplinary investigation evidences the importance of print culture throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in nations involved in competition and conflict. Retzsch's foundational set crucially engenders parody, and inspires the stage, literature, and three-dimensional objects, well beyond common perceptions of print culture's influence. This book is available in open access thanks to an Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) grant.

Das Lessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch 2019 beschäftigt sich mit der Beziehung zwischen der deutschen und der französischen bzw. der deutschen und der italienischen Aufklärung. Mit Beiträgen zu Bodmer, Lessing und Dante; Lyrik der Frühaufklärung und weibliche Traditionslinien; Lessings und Lichtenbergs Kenntnisse der italienischen Literatur; Lessings Terrasson-Rezeption; Die Rolle der Deklamation in der europäischen Aufklärung; Ludwig Unzers "Sehnsucht nach Italien"; die deutsche Candide-Rezeption; Wieland und die französische Aufklärung und Italien in deutschen Reiseberichten der Spätaufklärung.