THIS SECTION HAS four parts that collectively try to pinpoint the emergence of a complex notion of racial thinking and of marking a concept hitherto largely unmarked, namely whiteness; in the process, it delineates a focus area in eighteenth-century German studies but seeks to project an open discussion, one we’d love to see continued for years to come. I t is a discussion that anticipates not as much revision, as it foretells a dynamic exchange and new impulses for a field that has been forced, on more than one occasion, to defend its relevancy. C alls for reexamining names of organizations and the perceived narrow focus of the field, which on the surface Goethe Society and Goethe Yearbook might imply, and which one of the contributors discusses in this volume, are facets of this debate. What is the role that whiteness and, more broadly, debates on race, the world, and the diversification of scholarly narratives play in eighteenth-century German studies?

To be sure, the section's focus does not come out of nowhere but arises, almost naturally, from an increasing engagement with German materials in their non-German and/or comparative contexts, aiming at including “the outside Germany” as a constitutive element. These reference points and reconsiderations of the German eighteenth century indicate, perhaps, global thinking; equally possible, they might be merely a transatlantic figure of thought posing as global. O r they recall, somewhat well-worn at this point, the category of the transnational or transcultural. A gainst and alongside these rubrics, inquiries into race, whiteness, the Black Atlantic, and the scope of eighteenth-century thinking unfold.

In the following section, “Fractured Visions, New Horizons,” Birgit Tautz will discuss recent new work and forward-directed lines of thinking presented at ASECS 2022, a conference that unfortunately saw very few German studies contributions, followed by Patricia Anne Simpson's reflection on Penn State's symposium on the Legacy of Enlightenment Race Theory in the context of eighteenth-century studies, Sarah Eldridge's implied dialog with emergent comparative work as she previews her own book-length project on the centrality of the “white subject,” and a glimpse into a research network in progress, organized by our colleagues Claudia Nitschke and Sigrid Köhler in Durham and Tübingen, respectively, and featured here through a report on a preliminary area of investigation.

SINCE THE 1990s, interdisciplinary scholarship has been reframing a discourse about “extraordinary” bodies (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson) and the cultural construction of these as “unexpected” from a range of perspectives, including queer studies, intersectional feminism, posthumanism, disability studies, ecocriticism, and critical race theory. Garland-Thomson's path-breaking work decisively shifted a medicalized discourse to another register. Her intervention has reverberated across academic disciplines and activist platforms alike. The body—erroneously presumed to be human— continues to organize inquiry into the limits of the human. A lthough scholarship about the body frequently reflects presentist perspectives, eighteenthcentury aesthetics, with anthropocentric roots in Enlightenment thought and totalizing tendencies derived from assumptions about the body as a selfidentical, logical “whole” likewise offer extensive material for the analysis of bodies beyond the human.

In a previous “Forum on (New) Directions” (2021), two contributions, in particular, highlight the innovation related to “unexpected” bodies in our field. S tephanie M. Hilger's “Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century” calls attention to the health humanities, which “allow for a fresh perspective”; she elaborates: “Eighteenth-century thinkers wrestled with the separation of the humanities/mind from the sciences/body, yet they rarely questioned the supremacy of the mind.” Eleoma Bodammer's “Disability Studies and New Directions in Eighteenth-Century German Studies” seeks to extend the model of critical disability studies to our field, encouraging a discussion that “could take a variety of directions that might help to explain responses to disability in aesthetic theories, debates on humanity, and the history of emotions.” This, the final forum section of our editorship, builds beyond the horizons of the medical humanities and critical disability studies by foregrounding the cultural construction of the “body” and all its articulations in the eighteenth century. The contributions impressively show that, although anthropomorphic beliefs about the wholeness of the body frequently seek to ground and legitimize themselves in the eighteenth century, the actual historical landscape was much more porous, multifaceted, and in flux, indeed decentering anthropocentric mindsets, creative dispositions, and perspectives on eighteenth- century literature, culture, and the body.

FOR THIS EDITORIAL team, volume 30 represents our valedictory effort. Over the past year, some of us were able to transition from the Zoom squares to in-person conferences; we tentatively removed our masks, applauded with real hands, and continued debates in the corridors outside conference rooms. Nevertheless, we have come to value even more the continued opportunity to share work in this venue, and we as editors have particularly enjoyed bringing current debates, controversies, and new directions of ongoing, exciting research to these pages.

Hans Hahn's “Wielands Singspiel Alceste, ein Stein des Anstoßes für Goethe?” opens this issue with an exploration of the role Wieland's libretto, in particular, played in a literary dispute with Goethe. A certain synergy emerged in a cluster of contributions around issues of gender, influence, and female marginalization among Carl Niekerk's “Lotte's Bird, Female Desire, and the Language of ‘Sexuality’ in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers,” Maryann Piel's “La Roche and Goethe: Gender, Genre, and Authorship,” and an editorial by Margaretmary Daley in which she challenges us to confront gender bias. While Niekerk dwells on the scene of the canary's kiss as a moment in the history of sexuality at the edge of its biological and cultural construction, Piel latently picks up on Daley's challenge, restoring La Roche's constitutive role in Goethe's oeuvre (rather than the other way round, as much scholarship has it). Departing from scholarly analyses to the genre of editorial, Daley seeks to challenge women writers’ continued relegation to the margins of an eighteenth-century literary canon that she sees revolving around Goethe and/or other “great men”; in picking bias as a Schlagwort, Daley also begins to reflect on the state of the humanities more broadly, oscillating between the seemingly privileged position of choosing one's own research topics and the festering of structural inflexibilities that are contributing to the crisis of the humanities.

The next essay in the line-up, “Things of Art and Amor: Mediation in Goethe's Römische Elegien,” by Sebastian Meixner and Carolin Rocks, offers an innovative and compelling reading of the figure of Amor as poetic guide, matchmaker, rogue, servant, and mediator to Goethe's own Roman past.

Monographs and Edited Volumes

Jeremy Adler. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. London: Reaktion, 2020. 256 pp.

This presentation of Goethe's life and work in the Critical Lives series is just the book every scholar of Goethe has been looking for, and this not merely because it is deeply informed, original in its judgments, and keenly insightful, but also because it is the book to recommend to students and nonspecialists who, after having read, say, Werther or Faust, seek a picture of the overall achievement. The book's virtues are legion. Perhaps foremost among them is that it calls attention to Goethe's contemporary significance while firmly situating his work within the context of European literary and cultural history. Goethe's work comes into view here as both remarkably relevant to the concerns of our moment and as a nodal point in a webwork of cultural traditions extending as far back as the biblical and Greco-Roman interventions. Thankfully, Adler's interrogation of Goethe's life and work sloughs off the carapace of disciplinary obsession and gives us a Goethe who deserves to be a topic of urbane and literate conversation. I ndeed, the book is a demonstration of the indispensability of appreciation and discernment—the aims of “criticism” as it emerged in the Enlightenment—to a free and flourishing cultural life.

Every knowledgeable reader will find in Adler's book moments that illuminate their own particular zones of interest. A mong the segments I found especially salient was the account of Goethe's Italian sojourn and, in particular, the account of his deep engagement with Palladio. Brief but nonetheless sharply focused observations on Palladio's masterful treatise The Four Books of Architecture (1570), a copy of which Goethe, inspired by his autoptic inspection of several buildings, intensely studied, lead into an explanation of neoclassical form as remarkably supple and multivalent. The significance of Palladio's art for Goethe can, in fact, be studied in the latter's own drawings and commentaries on particular polyfunctional moments of architectural composition. A dler employs the insights gained from his consideration of the Palladio material in an account of the controlled fluidity that characterizes the verse version of Iphigenie auf Tauris, an account that, despite its brevity, is fresh and richly suggestive.

Transposed: A Book, an Editor, and a Nation?

Hans Müller-Casenov's The Humour of Germany is a strange book. First published in 1892 in London, it appeared—from 1893 on—as a joint imprint of Walter Scott Publishing Co. and Charles Scribner's Sons in London and New York City, respectively. Widely advertised throughout the 1890s and initially less widely reviewed, the book showed up almost immediately in library catalogs in the United States (and with slight delays in Britain). Even today, this English-language anthology, in all its 437 pages, retains some dormant presence on library shelves in the US, where documented holdings of 101 copies—with three fourths in university and one fourth in public libraries—by far outnumber those in other, mostly English-speaking countries combined (forty-seven copies). Its inclusion in HathiTrust's electronic depository widens access and availability and enables the book's material revival by making print-on-demand copies readily available. This is remarkable; as the volume has evaded the attention of literary scholars, it is not referenced in literary historiography and has literally disappeared from library shelves to be stashed in off-site storage facilities.

Its all-but-vanishing act notwithstanding, the book tells an impressive story: one about imagined readership in the transatlantic Anglophone world of the 1890s and about an effort to make Germany's literary nation palatable to readers outside of that nation.

THE PAST TWO years have brought many changes to academic life, one of which promises to be an organizational revamp and opening-up of US-based eighteenth-century studies, at least in their representation through ASECS. Two panels at this year's conference (Baltimore, 2022) are a case in point: the “Presidential Session Roundtable: New Horizons in Enlightenment Studies,” and “Visions of Empire.” While the panelists on the former individually and collectively wrestled with domineering whiteness as a paradigm defining the hitherto accepted scope of Enlightenment reach, the latter offered new impulses for interdisciplinary turns to the global: Historian Junko Takeda offered considerations on cultural erasure of premodern Armenians and their diaspora in the Americas and argued for a reframing of imperial power structures within trade networks (and beyond the carriers of national territory and languages), while literary scholars Hanna Roman and Melanie Conroy urged the reexamination of well-worn tropes in the Western imagination, namely the sunken island of Atlantis and maps, respectively. Roman showed that, while Atlantis is today considered to be thoroughly mythological, it has revealed tremendous power in terms of engineering and reengineering narratives of dominance as well as images of the global North (in juxtaposition with the global South) and thus, ultimately, of European “greatness” and—we might add—mythological whiteness. I n the end, Roman put forth an overarching plea for new stories of origin that, unlike the biblical text or sciences with their data and experiments, remain stories of imagination, which, however, encourage us to see the world—and its mythological translations—through a material remnant or illusion, namely a mysterious rock buried beneath an ocean. C onroy explained how three different types of maps circulating in the eighteenth century shaped the visual field for perceiving the world, ultimately establishing scale, dominance, and hierarchies of importance in a visually persuasive though manipulative manner. Finally, Elizabeth Cross cast a critical eye on the French empire—from the perspective of the Indian Ocean world. Reminding listeners not only of the fragile nature of empires whose power postures are always betraying anxieties of impending loss, she delineated how the French empire was subordinated, by both British colonial power and Indian inheritance, and how the French had to assert their power through trade hegemony.

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).

Translations and Editions

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust, A Tragedy, Part I: A New Translation with an Introduction and Notes. Translated and introduction by Eugene Stelzig. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019. 231 pp.

When one discovers a new translation of Goethe's Faust, especially when researching the large number of Faust texts available for course adoption, one may indeed need to assess many points of comparison with the other available translations. While I was still teaching, I did this on several occasions, especially for general education classes for undergraduates (in which the students seem to desire a “good read,” which I have usually taken to mean “an understandable text”), as well as for a liberal studies course in which graduate students, eager to engage with this profound work, desire a certain thematic depth that the translation does not hamper. Eugene Stelzig's new translation of Faust I can be recommended on both scores: the themes and complexities come through with minimal loss via Stelzig's most readable text.

Stelzig begins with an informative, albeit brief, introduction to interesting aspects of the author's life and the play. He emphasizes that Faust I is, in fact, two plays: first, it is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of human dissatisfaction with existence and evil, and second, it relates the Gretchen tragedy. With regard to the former, Stelzig is more perceptive than many a translator or critic, especially in terms of crucial issues, such as the dynamic between “becoming” and “negation.” This dialectic encompasses far more than merely the human condition and diabolical opposition on the surface level; the polarity extends to nature and science as well, and in fact to all areas of human experience. Stelzig recognizes this, and it comes through in his translation.

Faust has, of course, undergone numerous translations into English by some of the great and most adept translators of German literature, such as David Luke, Martin Greenberg, Walther Kaufmann, and others, as well as by a number of eminent Goethe scholars; each of these presents virtues that recommend it. Thus, today one discovers numerous choices when it comes to Faust translations available to the anglophone reading public. Stelzig's Faust I competes satisfactorily with them all: it is modern and notably unstuffy, earthy, and humorous where the original is humorous as well. But it also reflects elegance in the places where Goethe's language achieves high registers.