The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, which was founded in 1980 to promote the study of Goethe and his contemporaries. Originally conceived as a vehicle for Goethe criticism in English during the Cold War political tensions, when the most prestigious Goethe publication, the Goethe Jahrbuch, was not available to most Western scholars, the Yearbook subsequently gained the respect of the international community, and has published articles, in both English and German, by scholars from around the world; it is unique among other periodicals devoted to the...

Goethe, in association with his younger Romantic compatriots the Schlegels, Novalis, Fichte, and Schelling, struggled with the subject-object dichotomy, and tried to bridge the gap between self and other, consciousness and nature. His theory and practice prefigured the Romantics' determination to display and interrogate the linguistic and cultural structures informing their own thinking and modes of representation--what Goethe calls one's "Vorstellungsart." His work exploits, subverts, and supplants inherited conventions and signs, demonstrating with virtuosic irony that literature is a...

Part of a series devoted to Goethe criticism and studies of his contemporaries, this title features an extensive book review section.