No study of Goethe's early lyric poetry has been published in English in the last fifty years. But the reading of this poetry the author presents is not intended merely to introduce an English readership to a major body of work; rather, the book delineates for the first time in any language an account of the symbolic network or organizing myth that underlies Goethe's individual poems. This marks a decisive break with the previous research on Goethe, which has tended to view his poetry as the expression of occasional experiences. The author shows, on the contrary, that Goethe's lyric work circles around a core set of problems and figures, that it evinces a systematic coherence unperceived until now.

Goethe's ideas on colour and imagery crossed many borderlines: those of artistic processes and philosophical aesthetics, art history and colour theory, together with the science of perception. This investigation into his writings ranges across art from Antiquity, the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, as well as exploring the centrality of these issues to Goethe's literary work. Questions find answers, but also raise new questions. This systematic sequence of essays, originally written between 1999 and 2011, appeals to readers in all these separate areas, while drawing together their essential coherence.

What is the nature of desire? This book gives an accessible introduction to the concept, and a coherent critique of the competing theories of desire within contemporary theory. Through analysis of representations of desire in television and film, it considers ways in which the concept is theorized and presented on screen.

In this highly original study of the cultural assumptions governing our conception of people with disabilities, Lennard J. Davis argues forcefully against "ableist" discourse and for a complete recasting of the category of disability itself. Enforcing Normalcy surveys the emergence of a cluster of concepts around the term "normal" as these matured in western Europe and the United States over the past 250 years. Linking such notions to the concurrent emergence of discourses about the nation, Davis shows how the modern nation-state constructed its identity on the backs not only of colonized subjects, but of its physically disabled minority. In a fascinating chapter on contemporary cultural theory, Davis explores the pitfalls of privileging the figure of sight in conceptualizing the nature of textuality. And in a treatment of nudes and fragmented bodies in Western art, he shows how the ideal of physical wholeness is both demanded and denied in the classical aesthetics of representation. Enforcing Normalcy redraws the boundaries of political and cultural discourse. By insisting that disability be added to the familiar triad of race, class and gender, the book challenges progressives to expand the limits of their thinking about human oppression.

Figures of Natality reads metaphors and narratives of birth in the age of Goethe (1770-1832) as indicators of the new, the unexpected, and the revolutionary. Using Hannah Arendt's concept of natality, Joseph O'Neil argues that Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist see birth as challenging paradigms of Romanticism as well as of Enlightenment, resisting the assimilation of the political to economics, science, or morality. They choose instead to preserve the conflicts and tensions at the heart of social, political, and poetic revolutions. In a historical reading, these tensions evolve from the idea of revolution as Arendt reads it in British North America to the social and economic questions that shape the French Revolution, culminating in a consideration of the culture of the modern republic as such. Alongside this geopolitical evolution, the ways of representing the political change, too, moving from the new as revolutionary eruption to economic metaphors of birth. More pressing still is the question of revolutionary subjectivity and political agency, and Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist have an answer that is remarkably close to that of Walter Benjamin, as that “secret index” through which each past age is “pointed toward redemption.” Figures of Natality uncovers this index at the heart of scenes and products of birth in the age of Goethe.

What is the legacy of Theory after the deaths of so many of its leading lights, from Jacques Derrida to Roland Barthes? Bringing together reflections by leading contemporary scholars, Dead Theory explores the afterlives of the work of the great theorists and the current state of Theory today. Considering the work of thinkers such as Derrida, Deleuze, and Levinas, the book explores the ways in which Theory has long been haunted by death and how it might endure for the future.

The body has become an increasingly significant concept in recent years and this Reader offers a stimulating overview of the main topics, perspectives and theories surrounding the issue. This broad consideration of the body presents an engagement with a range of social concerns, from the processes of racialization to the vagaries of fashion and performance art, enacted as surgery on the body. Individual sections cover issues such as: the body and social (dis)order bodies and identities bodily norms bodies in health and dis-ease bodies and technologies. Containing an extensive critical introduction, contributions from key figures such as Butler, Sedgwick, Martin Scheper-Huges, Haraway and Gilroy, and a series of introductions summarizing each section, this Reader offers students a valuable practical guide and a thorough grounding in the fascinating topic of the body.

"The first comprehensive study of the lifework of Guo Moruo (1892–1978) in English, this book explores the dynamics of translation, revolution, and historical imagination in twentieth-century Chinese culture. Guo was a romantic writer who eventually became Mao Zedong’s last poetic interlocutor; a Marxist historian who evolved into the inaugural president of China’s Academy of Sciences; and a leftist politician who devoted almost three decades to translating Goethe’s Faust. His career, embedded in China’s revolutionary century, has generated more controversy than admiration. Recent scholarship has scarcely treated his oeuvre as a whole, much less touched upon his role as a translator.Leaping between different genres of Guo’s works, and engaging many other writers’ texts, The Translatability of Revolution confronts two issues of revolutionary cultural politics: translation and historical interpretation. Part 1 focuses on the translingual making of China’s revolutionary culture, especially Guo’s translation of Faust as a “development of Zeitgeist.” Part 2 deals with Guo’s rewritings of antiquity in lyrical, dramatic, and historiographical-paleographical forms, including his vernacular translation of classical Chinese poetry. Interrogating the relationship between translation and historical imagination—within revolutionary cultural practice—this book finds a transcoding of different historical conjunctures into “now-time,” saturated with possibilities and tensions."

A new crop of essays on topics in the literature of Goethe and the Goethezeit, with a special section providing innovative readings of Goethe's lyric poetry. 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 20 contains a special section on Goethe's lyric poetry with contributions from leading scholars. The essays incorporate a range of new methodologies that provide innovative readings of Goethe's most important poems, including contributions by Benjamin Bennett on Faust and Daniel Wilson on the West-östliche Divan. The volume also includesessays on Götz von Berlichingen, the Sturm-und-Drang sublime, the Nibelungenlied's place within Weltliteratur, as well as an examination of Schiller's notion of freedom. Contributors: Constantin Behler, Benjamin Bennett, Frauke Berndt, Fritz Breithaupt, Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge, Andrew Erwin, Patrick Fortmann, Edgar Landgraf, Horst Lange, Charlotte Lee, Claudia Maienborn, Joseph D. O'Neil, Elizabeth Powers, Christian P. Weber, W. Daniel Wilson. Daniel Purdy is Associate Professor of German at Pennsylvania State University. Book review editor Catriona MacLeod is Associate Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania.