An important factor in progressive Victorian women’s interest in Germany is the decades-long friendship of Anna Jameson and Ottilie von Goethe, in itself a sustained form of cultural exchange and a bond that opened cultural exchange to others in Germany and England. First exploring the backgrounds of Jameson’s and Goethe’s openness to other cultures and foreigners (Jameson’s Anglo-Irish heritage, the German and English reading circles of Goethe and her mother), the chapter turns to Goethe’s friendship circle and the erotic same-sex relationship of Adele Schopenhauer, who had fallen in love with Goethe as a young woman, and Sibylle Mertens-Schaaffhausen. These two were attracted to Jameson, who responded warmly to Mertens-Schaaffhausen. Jameson herself fell in love with Goethe on meeting her, though Goethe’s heteronormativity precluded reciprocal feelings, and desire modulated into deep, steadfast friendship from 1833 until Jameson’s death. The chapter then traces the phases and significance of this friendship, including Jameson’s willingness for almost two years to risk her career and income to accompany Goethe to Vienna when the widowed Goethe became pregnant out of wedlock and gave birth to a daughter she named after Jameson.

This part of the book considers how to study the work of a poet. It uses the poets Emily Brontë and Srinivas Rayaprol as case studies to illustrate how to build up a picture of a poet’s career, how to get to grips with their central interests and their ways of addressing them, and how to develop a response to a writer in the context of the broader critical debate around their work.

In 1960 Hans-Georg Gadamer, then a sixty-year-old German philosophy professor at Heidelberg, published Truth and Method ( Wahrheit und Methode). Although he had authored many essays, articles, and reviews, to this point Gadamer had published only one other book, his habilitation on Plato in 1931: Plato’s Dialectical Ethics. As a title for this work on a theory of interpretation, he first proposed to his publisher, Mohr Siebeck, “Philosophical Hermeneutics.” The publisher responded that “hermeneutics” was too obscure a term. Gadamer then proposed “Truth and Method” for a work that found, over time, great resonance and made “hermeneutics” and Gadamer’s name commonplace in intellectual circles worldwide. Truth and Method has been translated into many languages, including Chinese and Japanese. It found and still finds a receptive readership, in part, because, as the title suggests, it addresses large and central philosophical issues in an attempt to find a way between or beyond objectivism and relativism, and scientism and irrationalism. He accomplishes this by developing an account of what he takes to be the universal hermeneutic experience of understanding. Understanding, for Gadamer, is itself always a matter of interpretation. Understanding is also always a matter of language.

This chapter provides a biography of Gadamer and includes an overview of the philosophical work that Gadamer produced. It provides an account of his youth and education, his early career in Nazi Germany, and his career after World War II. He was named Rektor of Leipzig University in East Germany but gave up the position and came to West Germany, first to Frankfurt and then to Heidelberg. In 1960 he published Truth and Method, which slowly became recognized world-wide. He retired in 1968 and was very productive throughout his old age.

Throughout his life, Ibsen managed his career in a very advantageous way with help from a wide range of friends, colleagues and institutions. That contributed to his outstanding success, both artistic and financial. Ibsen biographies, however, have preferred to propagate a myth about the poor, unsuccessful and deeply misunderstood artist and his struggle to get ahead in life despite all the resistance he encountered. They have argued that it was only when he went into ‘exile’ in Italy and Germany that his artistic abilities were unleashed, and that it was outside Scandinavia that he eventually attained success and was recognized as the great creator of modern tragedy for ordinary people. The chapter addresses some of the most important critical and scholarly biographers such as Henrik Jæger, Edmund Gosse, Gerhard Gran, Halvdan Koht, Michael Meyer, Robert Fergusson and Ivo de Figueiredo. It highlights how they have portrayed Ibsen’s childhood, his upbringing, education, career, economy and rising success.

The Introduction first outlines the grounds for the collection’s dating parameters for ‘early Shakespeare’. It then discusses what a category such as ‘early’ or ‘late’ might mean for someone with Shakespeare’s long career, and how such temporally bound categories can condition critical responses. Next, it considers the many variables in play in Shakespeare’s early canon, discussing these with relation to the value ascribed to these works. The chapter then reflects upon how most readers of Shakespeare begin somewhere in the middle of the collected works, with super-canonical works like Twelfth Night and Hamlet, before, if ever, working to the margins of the canon where the early works reside. It concludes with brief summaries of each of the chapters in the collection, noting how contributors shed significant new light upon the formative part of Shakespeare’s career.

This is an essay about early Shakespeare and loss. It attempts to put some kind of order on a span of several years when Shakespeare is first writing plays, or parts of plays, in a commercial environment with fellow professionals. It discusses a period of time, the mid-to-late 1580s and early 1590s, for which much information about Shakespeare and other working dramatists is lost. It asks, how do you write about that kind of loss? And, what sort of data-sets do you hold up to the blank spaces of those years, knowing only the likelihood of Shakespeare’s activity, to enable plausible deductions about his early working life? It considers how the early canon has been categorized and written about, situates the documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s first forays in writing in the context of surviving evidence about theatrical activity in the 1580s, contextualizes Shakespeare’s overall career in the light of those of his peers, and, finally, considers some of the defining features of Shakespeare’s earliest writings.

This final chapter focuses on professionalism and the contribution of research engagement to educators’ professional knowledge and identities. It briefly revisits the systemic positioning of practitioner research in other countries before elaborating on the current vision of professional standards for educators in Australia. While the standards relate to the broad and diverse aspects of professional practice for teachers, there are explicit references to research engagement in some standards and there is also scope for research to help educators to ensure they are addressing the others. Throughout this chapter we ask the reader to consider the potential of engagement with and in research for supporting educators’ professional growth, and promoting school improvement and collective leadership. The chapter also focuses on the attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions of pre-service and in-service teachers in relation to practitioner research as they seek to develop their own professional identities.

This chapter deals with the challenges, opportunities and potential outcomes of practitioner research. It reconnects with the ideas of Chapters 2 and 3 to allow readers to reflect on the practicalities of practitioner research in terms of challenges and opportunities. Rather than present the challenges as barriers to practitioner research, the chapter discusses approaches that may enable practitioner researchers to reflect on the challenges and develop strategies for managing or minimising their impact. Just as it is important to acknowledge that practitioner research is not without certain challenges (as is the case with any research), it is essential to focus on the opportunities that practitioner research affords educators; we describe what we believe to be the major sources of opportunity in this chapter. The final section of the chapter provides authentic examples of outcomes of practitioner research in multiple contexts as a means to illustrate the possibilities that practitioner research offers when educators complete their research projects.