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Camden House, Inc. was founded in 1979 by professors James Hardin and Gunther Holst with the purpose of publishing scholarly books in the field of German literature, Austrian Literature, and German language culture. [1] Camden House books were published in Columbia, SC until 1998. When the company became an imprint in that year, place of publication moved to Rochester, NY.
The series Studies in German Literature, Language, and Culture [2] was established in that same year and continues to the present; over 350 books in this series have appeared as of 2011 The Camden House areas of interest expanded over the following years under the direction of James Hardin, emeritus professor at the University of South Carolina. German language literature in Austria and Switzerland were added to the purview of Camden House early in its history.
The new series Literary Criticism in Perspective was established in the following decade, and in time broadened to include American and British literature. The aim of this more specialized series was, and is, to elucidate the role of literary criticism over the years, to show how it is subject to varying vogues and philosophical or critical viewpoints, and how criticism itself is a mirror of changing taste and critical bias.
In the late 1980s, Camden House increasingly sought out highly qualified scholars to write or edit commissioned works, especially in its Companion series. It was fortunate in locating and working with prominent Germanists who brought out companions to the works of such canonical writers as Hartmann von Aue, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and many others over the next two decades. In addition, companions to major works were commissioned and published, including books focused on Goethe's Faust (I and II), the Nibelungenlied, Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan , and Mann's Magic Mountain . Distinct periods in the history of German literature were treated in companions to German Realism and German Expressionism. Additionally, Camden House established in its first decade of operation a series developed by James Hardin titled Literary Criticism in Perspective which not only provides the reception history of a given German or Austrian literary work, but records the changing nature of literary criticism itself over the years.
Another important aspect of the German program included translations of such key works as Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's Simplicius Simplicissimus , the first great German novel; Johann Beer's [3] early comic novel Teutsche Winternaechte (German Winter Nights [4] ); and Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung (Wilhelm Meister's Theatrical Calling), the neglected forerunner to the prototype of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship .
Publication of individually authored monographs on numerous prominent German writer have appeared in the Camden House list, as well as numerous works on German film, theater, song, satire, holocaust literature, literature of the German Democratic Republic, and Austrian literature.
The ten-volume Camden House History of German Literature, which appeared over a period of six years with completion in 2007, treats German literature in extended essays beginning with the earliest Germanic literature, including Gothic, and discusses in detail not only the literary highpoints of German literature—the High Middle Ages, the Age of Goethe, early twentieth-century works—but also generally neglected periods such as the Early Modern period. About this volume a reviewer wrote 'The editor and the contributors are to be praised for having accomplished a truly Herculean task through which this period finally receives the recognition it deserves. There is nothing comparable on the German, or any other, scholarly book market.' [5] The CH history is prima facie the most voluminous recent analysis of German literature in English; it engaged the collaboration of Germanists from the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Austria, and Australia. This is perhaps the most significant achievement to date of Camden House.
In recent years Camden House has branched out into North American literature, extending its series "Literary Criticism in Perspective" (series editors: Scott Peeples and James Walker) in that area and having launched a "European Studies in North American Literature and Culture" (ESNALC; series editor: Reingard M. Nischik) in 1996. [6] Part of the latter series is the 605-page History of Literature in Canada: English-Canadian and French-Canadian (ed. R.M. Nischik, 2008), Camden House's second major literary history and one of the extremely few histories of Canadian literature to discuss both Canadian literature written in English and Canadian literature written in French in a balanced way.
In 1998 Camden House became an imprint of its long-time distributor, Boydell & Brewer, and has continued to publish books in all the areas described above under the editorship of James Walker, who has been associated with the firm since 1994. James Hardin remains a consulting editor with Camden House.
German literature comprises those literary texts written in the German language. This includes literature written in Germany, Austria, the German parts of Switzerland and Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, South Tyrol in Italy and to a lesser extent works of the German diaspora. German literature of the modern period is mostly in Standard German, but there are some currents of literature influenced to a greater or lesser degree by dialects.
The Sorrows of Young Werther, or simply Werther, is a 1774 epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, which appeared as a revised edition in 1787. It was one of the main novels in the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and influenced the later Romantic movement. Goethe, aged 24 at the time, finished Werther in five and a half weeks of intensive writing in January to March 1774. It instantly placed him among the foremost international literary celebrities and was among the best known of his works. The novel is made up of biographical and auto-biographical facts in relation to two triangular relationships and one individual: Goethe, Christian Kestner, and Charlotte Buff ; Goethe, Peter Anton Brentano, Maximiliane von La Roche, and Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, who died by suicide on the night of Oct 29 or 30, 1772. He shot himself in the head with a pistol borrowed from Kestner. The novel was adapted as the opera Werther by Jules Massenet in 1892.
Karl Wilhelm FriedrichSchlegel was a German poet, literary critic, philosopher, philologist, and Indologist. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was one of the main figures of Jena Romanticism.
Johann Gottfried von Herder was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism. He was a Romantic philosopher and poet who argued that true German culture was to be discovered among the common people. He also stated that it was through folk songs, folk poetry, and folk dances that the true spirit of the nation was popularized. He is credited with establishing or advancing a number of important disciplines: hermeneutics, linguistics, anthropology, and "a secular philosophy of history."
Wilhelm Scherer was a German philologist and historian of literature. He was known as a positivist because he based much of his work on "hypotheses on detailed historical research, and rooted every literary phenomenon in 'objective' historical or philological facts". His positivism is different due to his involvement with his nationalist goals. His major contribution to the movement was his speculation that culture cycled in a six-hundred-year period.
Hermann Broch was an Austrian writer, best known for two major works of modernist fiction: The Sleepwalkers and The Death of Virgil.
Boydell & Brewer is an academic press based in Martlesham, Suffolk, England, that specializes in publishing historical and critical works. In addition to British and general history, the company publishes three series devoted to studies, editions, and translations of material related to the Arthurian legend. There are also series that publish studies in medieval German and French literature, Spanish theatre, early English texts, musicology, and other subjects. Depending on the subject, its books are assigned to one of several imprints in Woodbridge, Cambridge (UK), or Rochester, New York, location of its principal North American office. Imprints include Boydell & Brewer, D.S. Brewer, Camden House, the Hispanic series Tamesis Books, the University of Rochester Press, James Currey, and York Medieval Press.
Austrian literature is mostly written in German, and is closely connected with German literature.
Weimar Classicism was a German literary and cultural movement, whose practitioners established a new humanism from the synthesis of ideas from Romanticism, Classicism, and the Age of Enlightenment. It was named after the city of Weimar, Germany, because the leading authors of Weimar Classicism lived there.
— words chiselled onto the tombstone of John Keats, at his request
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Peter Härtling was a German writer, poet, publisher and journalist. He received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his major contribution to German literature.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German polymath and writer, who is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a profound and wide-ranging influence on Western literary, political, and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day. Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany, anatomy, and color.
Reingard M. Nischik is a retired German university professor and literary scholar.
Mechthild of the Palatinate (1418–1482) was a princess and major patroness of the literary arts in the 15th century.
George Guțu is a Romanian philologist, teacher in the Department of German Language and Literature of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest. He is also director of the Paul Celan Center for Research and Excellence and the Master programme "Intercultural Literary and Linguistic Communication Strategies", initiated by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures together with other departments of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures. His academic activity is based on the history of German literature ; German and Austrian contemporary literature; German literature from Romania, cultural inter-referentiality in Central and Southeast Europe, particularly in Bukovina, poetics, literary theory, translation, the history of German studies and guidance for PhD students. His research domains are the history of German literature; comparative literature; German literature from Romania; cultural inter-referentiality; imagology; the history and aesthetics of reception; theory and practice of translation.
Jakob Minor was an Austrian literary historian and Germanist.
August Sauer was an Austrian Germanist and literary historian. He is known for his publication of collected works by Franz Grillparzer, Ferdinand Raimund, Adalbert Stifter, et al.
David Gordon John Roberts is an Australian professor of German studies. He was awarded a Ph.D. at Monash University in 1968, supervised by Leslie Bodi. His main areas of research are modern German literature, socio-aesthetics of literature and the arts, and the aesthetic theory and cultural history of European modernism.
Cyril William Edwards was a British medievalist and translator. Teaching in London and Oxford, he published extensively on the medieval German lyric and Old High German literature, and translated four of the major Middle High German verse narratives.