Anglo-German Encounters with Drama and Poetry, 1760-1835
Royal Society of Edinburgh Susan Manning Symposium
Edinburgh, 13-14 June 2016
Organisers: Prof. Sandro Jung (Ghent University/IASH); Dr Michael Wood (University of Edinburgh/IASH)
The study of Anglo-German cultural relations in the long eighteenth century is a well-established subject of comparative literary studies. Approaches to the subject have focused on the mediation of one country’s cultural production by the other via explorations of the circulation of texts in the material form of the codex (both in their original language and in translation), their adaptations and imitations, and more recently the economic interconnections between the German and British book trades. Furthermore, adopting history-of-the-book approaches, scholars are increasingly studying the ways in which different booksellers and publishers packaged texts as part of a lucrative intercultural project that saw the production of paratexts (including illustrations) seeking to domesticate popular foreign texts, so as to integrate them in a grand narrative of national literary achievement.
While scholars such as Bernhard Fabian have mapped a number of book trade connections informing the mediation of British (literary) culture in Germany, Nathalie Ferrand has focussed on the presence and significance of translated works on the German market for belles lettres. Ferrand was one of the first to devote attention to the visual paratexts that various translations featured, but her examination—like the majority of studies in the field—focussed on the genre of the novel. This exclusive focus on the novel is underpinned by seminal studies of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Werther in Britain and Samuel Richardson’s fiction in Germany. But even within reception-specific accounts of the novel, scholarly emphasis has too frequently been placed on works of the canon, in the process obscuring the range of different texts from each nation that were consumed by readers abroad. Compared to the eighteenth-century novel in Britain and Germany and the ways in which each cultural community made sense of the productions of the other, the impact of drama and poetry—within an economy of vibrant cultural exchange—remains understudied.
The mania for the works of August von Kotzebue on the British stage and the presence of his Lovers’ Vows (Das Kind der Liebe) in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park has been closely studied, as has the reception of Shakespeare amongst the thinkers and writers of the short-lived Sturm und Drang. Yet studies to date have paid less attention to the myriad other German-language playwrights that populated British anthologies, libraries, and the stage, perhaps because most of them have now been consigned to the recesses of literary history. Furthermore, the attention given to playwrights such as Goethe, J.M.R. Lenz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Friedrich Schiller in the German reception of Shakespeare tends to overlook the ways in which the popular Unterhaltungsstücke of the German-speaking stage at the time embodied the influence of English Elizabethan theatre as a whole. Even after British writers had turned to German sources for poetic and dramatic inspiration and vice-versa, these two cultures turned to each other for literary sources; Christian Dietrich Grabbe’s reception of Byron is, perhaps, a case in point.
Long before translations of the dramas of Goethe, Schiller, and Kotzebue were produced in Britain, cheaply produced printings of their plays were being imported and marketed by such booksellers as the Edinburgh-based Peter Hill. German poetry in translation soon found its way into anthologies, so that by the 1790s shorter productions were readily available to British readers. The introduction of German drama was more ambitious, however, since within a few years of another, two series entitled “The German Theatre” were published both in Perth and London. Even before German drama was translated for consumption by British readers, German collections—from the 1760s—gathered together English plays in translation, Christian Heinrich Schmid’s Englisches Theater being an important but hitherto neglected example. Periodicals, equally, in both Britain and Germany, introduced the drama of each country to foreign readers, thereby contributing to the popularization of the nations’ dramatic productions—even though developments in the reviewing of foreign literature started belatedly (approximately twenty years later than in Germany) in Britain. After the initial explosion of Anglo-German literary relations at the end of the eighteenth century, intercultural exchange in the poetry and drama of Britain, Ireland, and the German-speaking world continued, but under some different conditions. Yet the effects of the Napoleonic Wars on the political and material dynamics of this interchange at the beginning of and into the middle of the nineteenth century has hitherto received insufficient attention.
The circulation of shorter texts, such as Gottfried August Bürger’s “Lenore,” and the influence it exerted on British readers still remains to be charted and properly understood. Case studies of the European reception of Salomon Gessner’s poems have been undertaken. But these studies have not, as a rule, contextualised translations of the poems as acts of cultural engagement with a genre that was not restricted to Gessner’s use but that had a significant number of followers in the German-speaking lands (with the works of whom Wordsworth and Coleridge, for instance, were familiar). In this respect, even while the textual fortunes of James Thomson’s The Seasons have been mapped within the British context of reading communities, the large number of poems published in the mid- and late eighteenth-century Germany, which invoke The Seasons as central intertext, have not been documented. Moreover, the continued interest in poets such as Robert Burns in the German-speaking world presents a multi-faceted reception that would benefit from further scholarship.
This symposium sets out to investigate the dynamics of Anglo-German intercultural exchange between 1760 and 1835 with specific reference to the drama and poetry of the period. The definition of ‘Anglo-German’ in this context is, however, to be understood broadly to include dialogue taking place between Britain and Ireland and the German-speaking world as a whole.
PROGRAMME
Day One – Monday 13 June
9.00-9.30am: Arrival
9.30am: Introduction
Panel 1 Dramatic Adaptation and Translation - Chair: Prof. Sandro Jung (Ghent)
9.45am: Prof. Sonja Fielitz (Marburg): 'Henry Fielding, Dramatist'
10.30am: Dr Johannes Birgfeld (Saarland): ‘"Das alte englische Lustspiel [...] wimmelt von Abgeschmacktheiten und nicht selten auch von Unanständigkeiten." - August von Kotzebue as translator of late 18th century English Comedies’
11.15am: BREAK
11.30am: Prof. Barry Murnane (Oxford): ‘British ghosts of the gothic novel. Dramatic adaptation as a medium of Anglo-German cultural transfer in the 1790s’
12.15pm: Dr Nils Reiter & Dr Marcus Willand (Stuttgart):‘German Translations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: What Digital Humanities know (that others don’t)’
1pm: LUNCH
Panel 2 Scotland and Germany - Chair: Dr Robert P. Irvine (Edinburgh)
2.00pm: Lucy Linforth (Edinburgh): '"From Scotland new Come Home?" Ghosts and Afterlives of Bürger’s "Lenore"'
2.45pm: Prof. Gauti Kristmannsson (Iceland): ‘Walter Scott‘s Trajectory from Translator and Editor to Author: The Symbiosis of Translation, Rewriting and Original Work’
3.30pm: BREAK
4.00pm: Dr Michael Wood (Edinburgh): ‘Of German Genres and Scottish Sentiments: Walter Scott, Henry Mackenzie, and the Schauspiel’
4.45pm: Prof. Bernhard Maier (Tübingen): ‘Student Experiences: John Stuart Blackie and William Edmonstone Aytoun in Germany (1829-30 / 1833-34)’
5.30pm: END OF DAY ONE
Day Two – Tuesday 14 June
10.00am: Coffee
Panel 3 The Politics of Cultural Exchange - Chair: Dr Anne Marie Hagen (Edinburgh)
10.45am: Prof. Sandro Jung (Ghent): 'The Female Body in Text and Image: Amelia, Lavinia, and Musidora in the German Translations of Thomson's The Seasons'
11.30am: Catherine Angerson (Birkbeck): ‘Dichtung and Dissent: British Encounters with German Poetry and Drama in theMonthly Review, 1760-1800’
12.15pm: LUNCH
1.30pm: Dr John Guthrie (Cambridge): ‘Milton in Germany’
2.15pm: Dr Maike Oergel (Nottingham): ‘Politics and Literature: the “Introduction” of Ernst Moritz Arndt’s Geist der Zeit into (Anti-Napoleonic) Britain 1806-08’
3.00pm: END OF SYMPOSIUM
This symposium is kindly supported by: the Royal Society of Edinburgh; IASH; 'Cultural Encounters/Cultural Dialogue' research strand, Division of European Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh; European Institutes for Advanced Study; and the FWO Transnational Textual Cultures network.