The Edinburgh German Yearbook 12: Repopulating the Eighteenth Century: Second-Tier Writing in the German Enlightenment

German literature and thought flourished in the eighteenth century, when a culture once considered a European backwater came to assert worldwide significance. This was an age in which repeated attempts to reform German literary and philosophical culture were made—often only to be overtaken within a few decades. It ushered in successive generations of exceptionally gifted poets and thinkers including Goethe, Kant, Klopstock, Lessing, and Schiller, whose names still dominate our understanding of the German Enlightenment. Yet this immensely productive period also brought with it new means of accessing and disseminating culture and a rapid increase in cultural production. The leading lights of eighteenth-century German culture operated against the backdrop of a yet more diverse and vivid cast of literary and philosophical figures since consigned to the second tier of German culture.
Through a series of essays that examine particular non-canonical works and writers in their wider cultural context, this collection re-populates the German Enlightenment with these largely forgotten movements, writers, and literary circles. It offers new insights into the development of genres such as the novel, the fable, and the historical drama, and assesses the dynamics that led to individual authors, circles, and schools of thought being left behind in their time and passed over or inadequately understood to this day.