The objective of this essay collection is to examine how the institutional role of literature may or may not be affected by various “ghosts.” By “ghosts” the editors mean both the ghosts depicted in Goethe's works and “the ability of literary ghosts through their haunting ways to convey meanings and forms of meanings long past” (3). Coeditors Simon Richter and Richard Block set the scene in their introduction by referencing Mikhael Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, in which an apartment houses multitudes of demons and ghosts. For Block and Richter this haunted apartment stands in for a “house of literature” in which “we can find entire and largely forgotten regions of non-normative representations and subject positions” (2). The contributors to this volume explore, each in his or her own way, these haunted aspects of literature, in particular Goethe's literature. But the scene from Bulgakov's novel also conjures up an eagerness to examine responses to literature in the spirit of Jane Brown's research. According to Brown, Goethe recognized the cultural wealth about to be lost and strived to recover and preserve the old traditions. Most of the essays in this collection engage with Brown's discourse, each taking on the issue of the persistence of literature and exploring the dark corners of the house of literature. Coeditors Block and Richter dedicate the volume to Jane Brown, whom they deem to be one of America's most accomplished Goethe scholars.

The volume consists of fifteen essays by prominent scholars and is divided into three parts. The first part, “The Ghosts of Goethe's Past,” deals with the effects of scientific advances on Goethe's work (Andrew Piper); the influence of the Gothic on his perceptual experience of architecture (Clark Muenzer); the case of doubles in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Faust (Helmut Ammerlahn); and what Goethe accomplished while experiencing “sacred vocal music in the intimacy of his home” (Meredith Lee). The second part, “The Ghost That Keeps on Giving,” draws attention to the fictional ghosts found in Goethe's works, with a heavy focus on Faust I and Faust II (Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard T. Gray, Robert Deam Tobin, and Peter J. Schwartz). Patricia Anne Simpson engages more closely with Brown's theory of allegory by looking at the figure of Gretchen in Adorno's readings and citations of Goethe's female figures.