This book offers a study of West-East cross-cultural and cross-contextual literacy by investigating Goethe s relationship to the poetics of fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz in the West-ostlicher Divan. Goethe s collection of poetry, this book argues, constitutes a turning point in the history of German poetic subjectivity. The intellectual and historical significance of the Divan is examined by considering Goethe s conception of history both in relation to Hegel s philosophy of history as well as the linear notion of progress throughout the nineteenth century. Furthermore,...