Editors’ Preface

Summary

IN THE MIDST of another challenging year, we are grateful to our authors, manuscript evaluators, and book reviewers—the latter so ably corralled by Sean Franzel—and, last but not least, our indefatigable copy editor, Monica Birth, who have all enabled us to put together another fascinating volume. Like the predecessors it has been our honor to edit, volume 29 of the Goethe Yearbook represents continuity and innovation; what sets it apart is the fact that several essays seem to continue the conversation begun in last year’s issue.

Edward Potter's essay on Anton Reiser speaks to both the unabating pursuit of scholarship on Karl Philipp Moritz (which we have featured frequently over the past two years) as well as the renewed interest in questions of sentimentalism as a literary period and eighteenth-century style. But Potter also turns to questions of sexuality and gender. These questions, focused in concepts of patriarchy and its disruption, are at the core of Birgit Jensen's essay, which branches out into broader concerns about cultural legacies and myth and invites their ongoing consideration. Befittingly, two more essays revolve around such questions, albeit in vastly different ways. History of philosophy and science scholar Oriane Petteni introduces a novel model of reading Goethe's morphology, reminding us that questions of algorithms and pattern recognition are no longer confined to digital humanities and computational studies of literature but have arrived as part and parcel of our methodological toolkit. And Robert Kelz takes us again to Argentina. In a fascinating prequel to last year's essay on Goethe commemorations, he invites us back into the complex politics of Buenos Aires in the twentieth century and the role of a German cultural icon. Equally compelling, Kelz invokes a transnational fascination with archival material and the cultural policies both hidden and exposed in them—particularly welcome at a time when onsite research ceased being an option for so many of us, unable to physically access the treasure troves of our work. The penultimate freestanding essay in this volume, Barry Murnane's reconsideration of Goethe's Weltliteratur in the context of Handelsverkehr (trade) with China continues a conversation about the worldliness of eighteenth-century German literature and culture that has been vigorous for some time now and gestures well beyond the uptake of individual concepts or motifs. Coincidentally, it also invites further dialogue with forthcoming or fresh-off-the-press books (at the time of this writing).