Shelley's German Afterlives

Schmid shows how reception processes work across linguistic, national, and cultural boundaries, taking the English Romantic poet Shelley's German reception as a case study. It also highlights Anglo-German literary and cultural relations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and supplies a theoretical framework for further analysis.

"Susanne Schmid s Shelley s German Afterlives, 1814-2000 is a superbly thorough and perceptive examination...As an assessment of the legacy of Shelley and Romanticism that reaches across national boundaries and scrutinizes intercultural dialogue, Shelley s German Afterlives is an outstanding scholarly accomplishment and a model for comparative reception studies." - The Wordsworth Circle"This probing and substantial analysis of Shelley's reception in Germany is the first to trace the impact of his personal tragedy, his lyric force and his political passion on a variety of major writers and movements over two centuries, and serves as a model for comparative reception studies." - Dr Elinor Shaffer, FBA; Director, Research Project: The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London

"Schmid's impressive monograph offers the first truly definitive account of Shelley's reception in Germany over the last two centuries. Drawing upon extensive research in English and German archival sources, Schmid persuasively argues that Shelley, the immaterial angel, left traces and imprints upon German literature and culture which endure to the present day. Both in its innovative methodology and in its concrete discoveries, this study breaks new ground and offers valuable insights to all readers of Romantic poetry." - James C. McKusick, Professor of English, The University of Montana"Shelley s German Afterlives constitutes a major, erudite scholarly recovery that is breath-taking in its scope. Schmid seamlessly melds together the bibliographical record; biographical adaptations; Shelley s reception among literary coteries, academic circles, and political radicals; translations of his writings both in Germany and Austria; and, again and again, his adoption as a mythic, transfigured poetic avatar whose multiple facets came to be revived generation after generation across the German-speaking world. In the end, this is a model history of how one national literary movement is absorbed into another, holding as great an import for German literary history as for a more localized concern with the abiding legacies of British Romanticism." - Stuart Curran, Vartan Georgian Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

SUSANNE SCHMID is Associate Professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Frankfurt University, Germany.