Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2022 -

This is a selection of 17 scholarly essays and lectures, written and delivered over a 40-year career by one of the UK's most eminent academic literary critics. The emphasis is on Goethe, Schiller, Romanticism, the 19th century, Heine, Shakespeare in Germany, the literary canon, poetry from Klopstock to Rilke, German book collections in Great Britain, and the tradition of academic freedom in Germany, the last a truly remarkable essay. Paulin (emer., Univ. of Cambridge, UK) provides many of his own translations. This is literary criticism and historical insight in the very best tradition: readable, accessible, transparently intelligent, connected, and enlightening. By joining the earlier literary historian Friedrich Gundolf with Goethe in the title, Paulin brings together two centuries of Geistesgeschichte, intellectual history at its finest. Bibliography and index are excellent; knowledge of German will be most helpful.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Those who are curious about how Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) became, and likely will remain, a perennial favorite among theater and literary audiences worldwide will find that Ibsen in Context goes a long way toward addressing that question. Fulsas (Univ. of Tromso, Norway) and Rem (Univ. of Oslo, Norway) intentionally chose breadth over depth in structuring the text, and this decision proves to be a virtue rather than a defect. In 30 brief essays an international group of stellar Ibsen scholars--most of them prominent, a smattering of them young and promising--provide a panoramic overview of the various forces that helped make the Norwegian literary figure an enduringly acclaimed global phenomenon. The editors divide the volume into five parts: "Life and Career," "Culture and Society," "Scandinavian Reception," "Internationalization," and "Afterlives." Collectively the essays offer the kind of expansive vista into Ibsen's biography, accomplishments, legacy, and milieu that specialized studies, with their relatively narrow perspectives, cannot offer. The volume is a fine complement to The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, ed. by James McFarlane (CH, Oct'94, 32-0782), and it joins a recent spate of titles on the genius progenitor of realism on the modern stage.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.