This essay collection grew out of a Hofstra University conference on the life, works, and influence of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the eighteenth-century German playwright, critic, and philosopher who essentially established a new national literature in Germany during the Enlightenment. The volume is divided into two main sections, in which various scholars confront and reevaluate two contrasting aspects of Lessing's character; the irrational poet and the rational thinker. In the first section, Lessing's aesthetics are discussed. His link to English literature, as well as his influence upon...

Among nineteenth-century novelists, there is probably none who speaks so directly to the modern reader as Fedor Dostoevski. His visions of alienation and terror have not lost their power to shake our complacency even in this present age, hardened as it is to violence and social decay. In this stimulating collection of essays, a distinguished group of specialists in comparative literature and the social sciences explores the themes and problems with which Dostoevski struggled as both a writer and as a man and assesses their continuing relevance to the modern world. Encompassing a wide range...

This collection of essays addresses a number of facets of George Orwell, examining both Orwell the man of letters and Orwell the political man. In his preface, Courtney Wemyss asserts that Orwell may not receive the recognition he is due because at present he is appreciated for the wrong reasons. The author of other fine novels (such as Burmese Days and Coming up for Air), Orwell should also be recognized for his literary criticism, book reviews, and documentaries, which depict the England of his times in the manner of Samuel Pepys. The Less-recognized--and equally important--facets of...

Born in 1749, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was one of the giants of world literature and the last European to embody the multi-faceted expertise of the Renaissance personality. Assembled to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his death, the essays included here are appropriately written from a variety of perspectives-- literary, humanistic, and scientific. A genuinely interdisciplinary collection, this volume is witness to the powerful influence Goethe's works have had on a wide range of subjects from fiction, drama, and art to physics, psychology, and psychiatry. The collection also...

This volume demonstrates that many scholars and stage directors firmly believe Schiller is very much a writer for the twentieth century. The essays provide a scholarly perspective on Schiller's relevance as a role model for twentieth-century writers and offer in-depth discussions of his idealism, his political views, and his neoclassicism, against the backdrop of the unbalanced and politically turbulent epoch in which he lived. Specific works are examined in light of their particular focus and relevance in drama and history. Part II offers new insights into Schiller's aesthetics, his...

President Jimmy Carter, like all his predecessors since World War II, experienced the blurring of lines between foreign and domestic politics while, paradoxically, the contrasts between those lines became more pronounced. In nearly every arena of domestic and foreign policy, he had to deal with the intrusion of the politics of both spheres.

The major concerns of the Carter foreign policy experience and, consequently, of the papers included in the volume were staffing the foreign policy apparatus, shifting human rights to the forefront of basic policy considerations, attempting to create...

Jimmy Carter was an unexpected president. The first Southerner since the Civil War to gain the office, he had pursued the presidency at the grass roots as an outsider. A president who sought to run a government as good as the American people, Carter soon found himself embroiled in system overload as he worked for a domestic agenda to increase park lands, made the federal judiciary accessible to more women and minorities, to better manage the civil service, to devise a rational long-range policy of energy consumption and conservation, and to keep the deficit under control. Deadlock with...

In this volume, experts on government examine historical as well as contemporary contexts to government structures in the United States and the states of the former U.S.S.R. Throughout, the contributors look at federalism at both local and national levels, and they try to assess how and why the two systems developed as they did. While the political history of the former Soviet Union favored a central monopoly-of-power system over a pluralism-of-separate-authority approach, this provides only part of an answer to a complex issue.

Taken together the collection provides an exhaustive...

Did Ronald Reagan and his policies engineer the defeat of international communism, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the elimination of decades of nuclear confrontation? Or, did the Reagan presidency simply benefit from decades of bipartisan military, economics, and political opposition to Soviet policies? Both positions are explored by such officials as Kirkpatrick, Meese, and Kemp, and by leading scholars of the era such as Ambrose, Graff, and Greenstein. In addition, they explore the invasion of Grenada, the air strike against Tripoli, the interventions in Central America, the...