German Literature

Nicholas Boyle is the Schröder Professor of German and President of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge. He was also Head of the University's Department of German from1996 to 2001. He has so far published two volumes of his prizewinnning biography, Goethe: the Poet and the Age, and his most recent book is Sacred and Secular Scriptures: a Catholic approach to literature published in 2004, based on the Erasmus Lectures which he delivered at Notre Dame University. Professor Boyle is a Fellow of the British Academy, holds an honorary degree from Georgetown University in Washington DC, and was awarded the Goethe Medal of the Goethe Institut in 2000.

German writers, from Luther and Goethe to Heine, Brecht, and Günter Grass, have had a profound influence on the modern world.

This Very Short Introduction presents an engrossing tour of the course of German literature from the late Middle Ages to the present, focussing especially on the last 250 years. Emphasizing the economic and religious context of many masterpieces of German literature, it highlights how they can be interpreted as responses to social and political changes within an often violent and tragic history. The result is a new and clear perspective which illuminates the power of German literature and the German intellectual tradition, and its impact on the wider cultural world.
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German writers, be it Goethe, Nietzsche, Marx, Brecht or Mann, have had a profound influence on the modern world. This Very Short Introduction illuminates the particular character and power of German literature, and examines its impact on the wider cultural world.