Edinburgh German Yearbook 12:
Re-Populating the Eighteenth Century: Second-Tier Writing in the German Enlightenment (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018)

Edited by Johannes Birgfeld (Universität des Saarlandes) and Michael Wood (University of Edinburgh)

‘If you want to know a nation, frequent its second-order writers: they alone reflect its true nature.’ – E.M. Cioran, The Trouble of Being Born

German-speaking culture in the eighteenth century is a long-established field of research. Scholarship has provided a thorough understanding of the period in which German culture both progressed at an exponential rate and increasingly turned into a major player on the world stage. This was an age in which substantial repeated attempts to reform German literary and philosophical culture were undertaken and often overtaken within a few decades. It was also a period in which an explosive increase in the accessibility of books, the emergence of theatres as places of mass entertainment, and the rise of an educated, wealthy bourgeoisie contributed to the availability of literature and culture to an ever-growing proportion of the population of the German-speaking world. The impulses and ideas generated by the writers of the earlier part of the century were then further taken up by a particularly talented generation of Dichter und Denker that came to maturity around and after 1770. Recent research on this period has focused its attention not merely on the indigenous works and ideas that powered German-speaking cultural renewal throughout the Enlightenment and beyond, but also on the dynamics of intercultural exchange underlying it.

Nonetheless, our present understanding of the German Enlightenment is still dominated by a vast array of major literary and philosophical figures including Gottsched, Goethe, Haller, Herder, Kant, Klopstock, Lessing, Schiller, and Wieland. It is in paying attention to such so-called ‘first-tier’ writers and thinkers that we have gained our present impression of the narrative of German cultural life in the eighteenth century. Yet while certain literary and philosophical figures, genres, movements, and schools of thought have survived literary history, it goes without saying that these existed against the backdrop of a yet more diverse and vivid literary and philosophical scene. This scene includes figures and works that, regardless of differing degrees of popularity, success, and influence in the period, have been and still too often are cast to one side by literary history.

What we might term ‘second-tier’ writers were, however, present in the period and wrote in response to or even influenced those figures that have survived cultural history. Yet we find long lists of names (including, among many others Therese von Artner, Cornelius Hermann von Ayrenhoff, Hinrich Borkenstein, Johann Friedrich von Cronegk, Johann Nepomuk Cosmas Michael Denis, Johann Jakob Dusch, Leopold Friedrich Günther von Goeckingk, Philipp Hafner, Johann Timotheus Hermes, Theodor Gottlieb Hippel, Therese Huber, Daniel Jenisch, Anna Louisa Karsch, Joseph Felix von Kurz, Michael von Loen, Theodor Johann Quistorp, Franz Christoph von Scheyb, Karl Franz Guolfinger von Steinsberg, Moritz August von Thümmel, Daniel Triller, Adam Gottfried Uhlich, or Leonhard Wächter) whose output and productivity find themselves too rarely at the focus of scholarship. In addition, a number of the individual works ascribed to genres that came to prominence in the period have since been written off as not worthy of academic study. This is often due to a general suspicion that such works are no more than cheap imitations of individual first-tier works by Goethe, Lessing, and others.

This volume of the Edinburgh German Yearbook seeks to provide new perspectives on the culture of the eighteenth century in the German-speaking world. By focusing on second-tier writers and movements, we hope to provide an analysis of aspects of the rich backdrop against which German cultural life in the eighteenth century was able to flourish. In re-populating the eighteenth century, we aim to contextualise the literary production of the Enlightenment and foster a more diverse narrative of the period that possibly challenges our present understanding of it. Moreover, it is also our hope to discover aspects of the dynamics that consign particular genres, persons, or movements to the second tier; and to ask how helpful such distinctions are in thinking about cultural, philosophical, and literary history.

The editors invite abstracts for contributions studying the second-tier in eighteenth-century literature and thought. Essays may focus on a particular figure or group of figures or on specific genres, forms, and literary and literary critical movements and schools of thought. Topics may include:
• Poetry;
• Theatre and performance;
• The novel;
• Popular forms of literature and entertainment;
• Philosophical/critical schools of thought and transmission and their relation to literary culture;
• Literary and philosophical networks and institutions;
• Translators and translations of second-tier works;
• Second-tier writing as a response to first-tier works and figures;
• First-tier literary works as a response to second-tier writing.

Please e-mail abstracts (max. 300 words) for proposed contributions, along with a short biography, to both Johannes Birgfeld (j.birgfeld@mx.uni-saarland.de) and Michael Wood (michael.wood@ed.ac.uk) by 31 January 2017. We will confirm acceptance of proposed papers by 1 March 2017. Contributions of 6,000-7,000 words in English will be required by 31 December 2017 to be sent for peer review, and we expect to see the volume published in autumn 2018.

The Edinburgh German Yearbook, launched in 2007, encourages and disseminates lively and open discussion of themes pertinent to German Studies.