The goal of this series, published under the guidance of Hans-Gert Roloff, is to document the literary treatment—and transformation—of the historic figure Martin Luther. In total, the series plans facsimile publication of seventeen representative works from 1520 to the present containing new introductions and notes written by specialists in the field. The series is divided into five sections: sixteenth century (eds. Roloff and Anne Wagniart); seventeenth century (ed. Jörg Jungmayr); eighteenth century (eds. Sabine Gruber and Ralph Zade); nineteenth century (eds. Gerd-Hermann Susen and Edith Wack); twentieth–twenty-first centuries (ed. Andreas Keller).

The literary afterlife of Luther is unique: no other figure in German literature has experienced such a mass of literary documentation through the centuries. The purpose of the series (seventeen volumes are planned) is to document how widely different authors saw and interpreted the man and his ideology. It is important to note that the series does not attempt to differentiate works on the basis of their presumed literary value. Rather, it aims to publish works that are largely forgotten or neglected in order to provide disparate views of Luther over the centuries since his death.

It is noteworthy that the institution of the Lutheran Church has generally ignored this body of literature—all the more reason to provide it now. In fact, the Lutherhandbuch 2017 provides precious few references to “Lutherbilder und Memorialkultur.” Luther scholarship has hardly made note of the numerous literary works on Luther. One Luther specialist writes: “Von den Lutherdramen, den Lutherromanen und den Luthergedichten … ist kein Stück in den Kanon der deutschen Literatur eingegangen” (Hartmut Lehmann, Luthergedächtnis 1817 bis 2017, 2016). Indeed, recent Luther scholarship in general has neglected the literary treatment of Luther. Yet, in the nineteenth century alone almost fifty Luther dramas appeared; in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a like number of literary texts in all genres were published.

Literary historian extraordinaire Karl S. Guthke has shed light on yet another dark corner of the Age of Goethe. Most readers of this review will catch the irony of his title in relation to a certain biographical detail about Goethe—that he never in his life glimpsed the Atlantic Ocean in person, and hence could hardly have traveled to South America. The subtitle explains the irony: living abroad in Weimar. The “travels” we learn about are vicarious, through books and oral debriefings. What Goethe may have known about Latin America has been a subtopic of previous work by Guthke, such as Goethes Weimar und “Die große Öffnung in die weite Welt” (2001). Nor is (as Guthke acknowledges in footnotes) this the first book to play on topography in this fashion, for example, Dieter Strauss titled his book Goethes Wanderjahre in Lateinamerika und der Südsee (2014), and Sylk Schneider published Goethes Reisen nach Brasilien; Gedankenreise eines Genies (2008).

An important stimulus for Goethe's interest was provided by individuals who were part of his network. Alexander von Humboldt dedicated his 1807 Ideen zur Geographie der Pflanzen to Goethe, who read the work with great interest, as he did nearly everything that Humboldt published on the Americas. Duke Carl August's “man in London,” Johann Christian Hüttner, regularly sent résumés of British travel books, to give an idea of what should be purchased. These reports, delivered between 1814 and 1824—namely, the period in which Spanish America won its independence—have remained in 120 pages worth of manuscript, and have so far been mentioned only in passing by Goethe scholars, rather than fully analyzed, as Guthke does in this book. Goethe, who most likely made most of the purchasing decisions given the poor quality of the Duke's English skills, acquired twenty-one of the books for the Weimar library, the bibliographic data for which Guthke provides. Thus, the brief chapter that revisits published Goethe references to Spanish America is followed by the remark that these sources are “wenig aufschlussreich” (25). The bulk of the book is taken up with an amplification of Hüttner's reports, as though we were looking over Goethe's shoulder at them and noticing what he underlined.

GOETHE SPECIALISTS WILL recognize the hexametric prosody of the German lines in the epigraph as belonging to Hermann und Dorothea, even if they perhaps do not quite recall their exact place in the idyll, or the character who speaks them. (It is Hermann's father in the second canto, “Aussicht,” 2.183–85) They will certainly notice the several errors in transcription: “angestattet” instead of “ausgestattet” (“angestattet” not being a word in German, I have translated it with the English neologism “adurned”); “möch”; and “zulezt.” And anyone can see that this resulting text is bilingual. The final line in Portuguese says that the next verse came to “her”—the novel's protagonist— unwittingly, and that she rejected it. The number refers the reader to a footnote that provides a somewhat free translation of Goethe's lines into Portuguese, which are almost the last lines in Mário de Andrade's 1927 novel, Amar, verbo intransitive. Idílio (To love, intransitive verb, idyll; hereafter Amar).

The “she” is a German woman named Elza living in Brazil, who is usually referred to as “Fräulein”; various sentences in German, or sentences sprinkled with German words, as well as an entire poem by Heinrich Heine declaimed by Elza's pupil, appear in the middle of the Portuguese. In the erlebte Rede (i.e., free indirect discourse) narrative modality of much of the novel, German authors and poems are cited repeatedly. The citations are sometimes translated, or more frequently mistranslated.

“A Silver Dish” was first published in the September 25, 1978, issue of The New Yorker. It was collected in Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984). It is currently most readily available in Bellow's Collected Stories (Penguin).

I love this story because it begins as every story, every poem, every play, every novel ever written might well begin: “What do you do about death?” That's Bellow for you: six words in, and we are confronted not only with the existential, the essential question, but with the straightforward, no-nonsense voice of the man who asks it: Woody Selbst, of Selbst Tile Company (“offices, lobbies, lavatories”), “a modern person, sixty years of age, and a man who's been around.”

Bellow then puts a fine point on the question: “How, against a contemporary background, do you mourn an octogenarian father, nearly blind, his heart enlarged, his lungs filling with fluid, who creeps, stumbles, gives off the odors, the moldiness or gassiness, of old men. I mean! As Woody put it, be realistic.”

In his Lectures on Literature Nabokov refers to the storyteller as a master magician, and I love this story because all that is masterful about Bellow's work, all that is magical, is on display as he swiftly conjures Woody's biography: two years in the seminary, mother a Christian convert, father Morris a Jew, “vital and picturesque,” who “relished risk or defiance,” and who is now one week in his grave, dressed in the Hawaiian shirt Woody himself had brought home from a tilers’ convention in Honolulu. A week in, Woody, this practical man, has been “too busy to attend to his own feelings except, intermittently, to note to himself, ‘First Thursday in the grave.’ ‘First Friday, and fine weather.’ ‘First Saturday; he's got to be getting used to it.’ Under his breath he occasionally said, ‘Oh, Pop.’”

Notice the sleight-of-hand in that last sentence: all the grief “A Silver Dish” will evoke and illustrate and grapple with is contained therein.

The stock market crashed on October 29, 1929, and the flapper vanished faster than her sheik could swallow a goldfish. In 1925, Ray Henderson, Sam M. Lewis, and Joe Young had written “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue.” Three years later Cole Porter replaced “Let's Misbehave” with the equally naughty “Let's Do It.” By 1930, however, Ira Gershwin had spun out a plaintive lyric to “But Not for Me,” (George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, Girl Crazy, 1930), Al Dubin wrote the lachrymose “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes” (Joe Burke and Al Dubin, 1930), and Leo Robin wrote the self-pitying “Prisoner of Love” (Russ Columbo, Clarence Gaskill, and Leo Robin, 1931). The characteristic ballads of the Depression tell a much different story than do the lighter-than-air love songs of the twenties, but despite what Peter Flynn calls their “forlorn escapism,” they ensured the survival of an urban sensibility for at least another decade. Woody Guthrie and the Almanac Singers were out on the road, singing labor songs and helping factory workers organize, but most Americans in big cities and small towns alike continued to embrace Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songs that rose, at least figuratively, from the hard pavements of New York City. It was a different kind of urbanity. In 1928, Milton Ager and Jack Yellen wrote the happy-go-lucky “Happy Days Are Here Again,” for a scene in an early talkie that depicted soldiers celebrating the end of World War I. But no one performed it until Black Thursday, when jeering listeners at New York's Hotel Pennsylvania belted it out along with George Olsen's Orchestra to transform it into an ironic Depression anthem, the other side of the same coin as a song such as Jay Gorney and E. Y. Harburg's “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

Broadway mounted 233 productions, musical and otherwise, during the 1929–30 season. The next year, the number dropped to 187. The Broadway historian Robert Rusie observes that “the talent that Hollywood absorbed from Broadway was in the vicinity of 75%. By 1939, there were only 98 new openings. Things were even tougher for vaudeville. In 1925, vaudeville circuits controlled 1500 theaters. By 1930, only 300 remained and most of them were sharing performance time with movies.”

CENTURY MARKERS PREDICATED UPON the births and deaths of writers have a certain arbitrary quality. Why should 2017, the centenary year of Robert Lowell's birth, be particularly significant? Yet what may seem arbitrary does, in fact, have a solid anchoring in political and literary history. The year 2017 saw not just a host of events memorializing World War I and the epochal significance of America's entry onto the world stage in that war in 1917, coincident with the Russian Revolution, but it also saw a number of literary gatherings that reassessed the significance of Robert Lowell, a poet arguably more closely connected with the political history of his time and the history of his country than any other American poet in the twentieth century. Two of the highest-profile gatherings of scholars occurred in March, in Dublin, Ireland, and in April, in Fribourg, Switzerland. In the essays presented in this volume, developed from the contributions to the Fribourg conference, Lowell emerges as a poet of international resonance and significance. More important, Lowell's work proves amenable to new forms of critical appreciation, which in turn produce fresh insights ranging from considerations of his biography—his marriages, travels, mental health—to his intellectual nimbleness in conversation with his contemporaries—Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Giuseppe Ungaretti—and to his place in the history he so assiduously gathered in volumes of poems, the thickest of which is itself called History. This volume demonstrates how Lowell's mind engaged with Europe and its poetic and intellectual traditions in active, not just receptive, ways, and it takes its readers to places and mental spaces—Holland, steamship travel, hospitals, desires, and border-crossings—that have not been previously highlighted in the same manner. The poet who published Imitations in 1961, a book often forgotten when Lowell's works are listed, never ceased to be in conversation with Europe and with history.

Starting in 1955, Robert Lowell was engaged in drafting parts of his autobiography and writing decidedly autobiographical poems. “These are the tranquillized Fifties, / and I am forty,” the poet-speaker ruminates in “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” inviting the reader to place the poem's genesis in 1957, forty years after Lowell's birth.

“My Father Sits in the Dark” was originally published in the November 1934 issue of Story. It was collected in The Horse That Could Whistle “Dixie” and Other Stories (1939). It is currently most readily available in The Norton Book of American Short Stories (W. W. Norton).

Jerome Weidman had a long career as a novelist, playwright, short-story writer, reporter, and contributor to The New Yorker and other popular magazines. His early novel, I Can Get It For You Wholesale, was both a best seller and shocking for its time. There were other commercial successes. His book for the musical Fiorello! won a Pulitzer Prize. He was a working professional, a writing writer, with unashamedly commercial intentions. He once told me that his legal training—speed typing—was a major contribution to his career.

I didn't expect to discover that he has also written a miniature masterpiece in “My Father Sits in the Dark,” a very short story published first in The New Yorker. Jerome Weidman's known strengths as a writer were accurate dialogue, reminiscent of John O'Hara and Hemingway but with a New York Jewish accent, and the ability to depict upward-striving Jewish life in the familiar world of immigrants and their children.

This story—poetic, cadenced, unstructured, modest in length, carried by intense feeling without a moment of self-pity or inflation—was written early in his career.

It is merely a young man's account of spying on the older man who would be an utter stranger if he were not his father—that's all it is. The narrator watches; the old guy sits there alone, unaware. Neither utters any declaration of feeling. There is silence in the room, all around; silence envelops them. The father has no sense of the turbulence in the son's watching.

And the wonderment of connection between son and father, of love, lost opportunity, melancholy, the mystery of time passing and age—the arbitrariness of our souls on earth—is given something like a name. Of course there is no name and it cannot be named. And that's all and enough. As in William Saroyan's early story, “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” there is the sudden flare of something like genius.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE surrounded himself with collections at home ranging from art and cameos, rock formations and bones to wallpaper and furnishings. His observations on things are brief and unsystematic, but can be found throughout his oeuvre in various genres. Reconstructing the important role of tangible, inanimate objects in Goethe's spatial environment from his remarks in several of his nonfictional narratives, letters, and essays, I argue that objects serve as a medium for social interaction, such as collecting, gift exchanges, and enhancing sociability. Here we could say with Michael Callon that objects act as “intermediaries for human action.”

In addition, objects serve a more complex role: things support Goethe's form of conceptualizing, clarified spatial relationships, sparked observations, engendered insights, and evoked memories. These often interrelated dimensions in Goethe's thinking on objects and their association with the subject, influenced not only Goethe's lifestyle but also his worldview. This dynamic of intra-activity between subject and object (and to a lesser degree among things), allowed Goethe to stage his environment to maximize the influence of objects in his way of living, which supported his way of knowing.

The more general question raised by Goethe's connection to the object is whether he offered a new way of thinking about the boundaries between subject and object. My argument is that Goethe's ontology favors an open stance of the subject that ascribes a highly significant role to the object in a dynamic interactive relationship as we will explore below.

The Visual Dimension

While the subject-object relationship is a frequent topic in the philosophy of the time, this exceeds the scope of this article, as we focus here on visual dimension. Scholarship on this relationship in the area of the visual arts focuses predominantly on Goethe's life-altering experiences in Italy.

“Girl” was first published in the June 26, 1978, issue of The New Yorker. It was collected and is currently most readily available in At the Bottom of the River (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

The first time I read this story, I read it as my students do. I was a student myself, unmarried, without children, and I laughed and disparaged the speaker—the mother—as my students still do. What a bossy know-it-all, my students say and I said when I first read it. Telling her daughter what to do, not allowing the daughter to make up her own mind and so horribly old fashioned. My students snicker.

Some of them nod knowingly. The young women especially hear their mothers’ voices. They recognize the cadence and the chiding, Mother fully expecting her daughter to screw up and already disappointed, unhappy in advance. Although the particulars of the mother's instructions are unique to Antigua and Barbuda, the tone is universal. It's a story about trust, and the mother definitely does not trust her daughter to know what is the right thing to do.

As a young student, I too heard my mother's voice. “Do you hear me?” That was my mother's refrain. When she was angry. When she was telling me I'd made another mistake. Do you hear me? Meaning was I listening? Was she being understood? Pay attention, she was saying, this is important. And in the single line that is the daughter's interjecting voice in “Girl,” “I don't sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday School,” we hear the typical teenager replying none of this is important, Mom, you obviously know nothing about me or my life or how I behave.

In 690 words Jamaica Kincaid tells the trajectory of an entire relationship, complete with expectations of the future, but obliquely. She avoids the traditional storytelling, “Once there was a girl and she lived in Antigua and her mother was always telling her what to do” and does it in voice, in rhythm, in the precise choice of each word. Without being told directly, we know the girl thinks she will never measure up and also that ultimately she will leave her mother behind.

In 1763, Europe was full of ghosts, of military dead. That year saw the end of the disastrous Seven Years’ War—involving all the great powers, Austria, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia, and with around one million fatalities—in the Treaty of Paris and the Treaty of Hubertusburg. Britain was one of the victors, though at a cost of perhaps 20,000 combatants. But it was ultimately from an earlier, smaller, but significant local conflict in Britain, the Jacobite Uprising of 1745–76—in essence a dynastic quarrel between supporters of the Stuarts and the Hanoverians over the succession to the throne—that there emerged a poet who caught Europe's imagination in celebrating its ancient hero-warriors and their ghosts. A Gaelic bard apart, a rival to Homer, James Macpherson's Ossian seduced a continent. Napoleon, an enthusiast for Ossian, and his battlefield opponents alike carried the poems in their saddlebags, despite heated accusations among literary critics of the time that they were literary forgeries.

As a young boy, however, Macpherson had experienced the savage reprisals of Hanoverian troops against his fellow-Highlanders in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden (1746) that ended the Stuart claim to the British throne. Exposed from birth to the oral traditions of the Gaelic-speaking Highlands, he later attended the lectures of the noted Homer scholar Thomas Blackwell at the University of Aberdeen. Struck by the stirring episodes of the Homeric epics, and with encouragement from Edinburgh intellectuals such as Hugh Blair (1718–1800), professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at the University of Edinburgh, who contributed an important and influential “dissertation” to the 1765 edition, he claimed that the poems he published were “translations” from Gaelic. The tone of the poems, with their dwelling on feeling, heroism, and transitoriness, appealed to readers tired of clever but arid neoclassical verse. But critics such as David Hume and Samuel Johnson, tied to the classical world of literature and current French literary fashion—at the same time ignorant of the Highlands and Gaelic poetic traditions—demanded that Macpherson produce the “originals” from which he had made these.

Alexandre Levy's composition Comala, his opus 11, written in 1890, advertises itself as a Poema sinfonico para grande orquestra. It is both an evocative response to the Ossianic poem of that name and a highly accomplished work for a twenty-six-yearold. Less typical than other pieces of the composer that incorporate elements of Brazilian popular music, its antecedents are in the symphonic tradition of illustrative or program music such as the concert overtures of Mendelssohn or tone poems of Franz Liszt. His life spanned the musical period between Offenbach's opera bouffe La Belle Helene (1864) and Debussy's “L'apres-midi d'un faune” (1892). Born in Sao Paulo, Alexandre (1864–92) and his three siblings were children of the French clarinetist Henrique Louis Levy, originally from Dehlingen in Alsace, and Anne Marie Teodoreth, a Swiss from Treyvaux in the Fribourg canton. Henrique had fled to Switzerland at the time of anti-Semitic riots in February 1848. Later that same year, the couple emigrated to Brazil, settling first in Campinas, the city of the renowned opera composer Carlos Gomes (1836–96). Eventually they moved to Sao Paulo, where in 1860 they founded the Casa Levy, a piano and sheet music store that was also an important outlet for concerts and informal music-making. It still exists.

Alexandre received his first piano lessons from his brother Luiz (1861–1935) and had further musical training from the French pianist Gabriel Giraudon. With his brother he set up the Clube Haydn in 1883 to encourage musical culture in São Paulo, and two years later, in 1885, he conducted an orchestra of twenty-six players in a performance of Haydn's Symphony No. 1. In 1887 he went to Europe, spending nine months in Milan and Paris in order to take lessons from Emile Durand, Debussy's teacher, and from Vincenzo Ferroni, who had studied with Massenet. A number of Levy's compositions had been published in the early 1880s and by this time his work was entering a mature phase: he drew particularly on native urban music, in works such as the Variations sur un theme populaire bresilien (1887), which uses a Brazilian children's song.

Increasingly, as the focus on Ossian after the mid-nineteenth century shifted from south to north in Europe, the cantata began to take on features of the operatic stage, with occasional directions for scenery and action. An example of this trend is Comala, poeme dramatique, by Joseph Jongen (1873–1953), written in 1897. Marie- Alphonse-Nicolas-Joseph Jongen was born on December 14, 1873, in Liege. Aged seventeen when Cesar Franck died, he has been described as a follower of that composer. But after studying in Germany (a condition of the Grand Concours in composition) he began to forge his own individual style. His first musical education was from his father, and thereafter he studied at the Conservatoire royal de musique in his native city. At the time he obtained his diploma, he was taking lessons in composition from the director of the conservatoire, Jean-Theodore Radoux, and won a prize for piano and organ performance in 1895. Participating in another competition of the Beaux-Arts de l'Academie royale de Belgique, he won second prize for a trio for piano, violin and cello, first prize going to Francois Rasse.

Discouraged by this relative failure, Jongen wanted to withdraw from the Prix de Rome competition but was persuaded to enter by Radoux, his father, and friends. Finally, he gained the coveted prize at the age of twenty-four, winning for his cantata, Comala (1897). After studying abroad as a condition of his award, Jongen taught harmony for more than two decades at the Liege Conservatoire, from 1898 until 1920 (with the exception of a stay in England during World War I), and at the Brussels Conservatoire from 1920 to 1933. In the summer months he composed mainly at his country house in the Ardennes, near the area called “Balmoral” because of the many British who visited during the nineteenth century. It was there that he died on July 12, 1953. With over 240 works to his credit, in almost every genre except opera, he showed a predilection for organ, piano, and chamber music.

Joseph Jongen's Comala (1897)

Tucked away in the top right-hand corner of the title page of his cantata, Comala, is the notation by Jongen: “J'ai été laborieux” (I've labored).

The philosopher David Hume, already celebrated in his day as the author of Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), was at first an enthusiast for the Ossian prose poems but increasingly had doubts: he declared to James Boswell that “if fifty barea–ed highlanders should say that Fingal was an ancient Poem, he would not believe them.” He could not credit that a people who were forever concerned to keep themselves from starving or being hanged should preserve in their memories a poem in six books. In other words, the Highlanders were hopelessly illiterate, a Lowland view that had persisted at least from the days of King James VI, who had proclaimed Gaelic-speaking Highlanders “utterly barbarous”—that is, they did not behave according to the civilized manners of the time.

Dining at David Garrick's in London, Hume met Edmund Burke, who told him that the Irish protested they knew all these Ossian poems, but he could never find anyone able to repeat the original verses. Burke, at least, had been exposed in his youth to Irish Gaelic, but Hume and many other Lowland Scottish literati were not at all familiar with the contiguous Celtic language and rich oral tradition of their own Highlands. Even in his own lifetime that tradition was producing, at midcentury, poets of the quality of Dugald Buchanan (1716–68), Rob Donn (Robert Mackay, 1714–78), Alexander MacDonald (ca. 1698–1770), and Duncan Ban MacIntyre (1724–1812). The last of these moved to Edinburgh in 1767, serving as a constable in the City Guard from then until 1806, and his poems were published there in 1768. In 1769 Hume himself finally settled in Edinburgh, living in the city until his death seven years later. In any case, the pull of literature and aesthetics in “North Britain” at the time was toward the classical world, and to France.

The effect of Macpherson's poems, for one astute critic of the time, was of “personal intonations” rather than “literal translations”—what we might call a kind of literary ventriloquism.

[Leather-bound, gold tooling, gold leafing, three volumes, one for each act, the pagination the same as for the single volume.]

COMALA,/A/Dramatic Poem/from/OSSIAN/As performed at the/Hanover Square Rooms/Set to Music by/MISS HARRIET WAINEWRIGHT/Dedicated with Permission to the/Most Noble Marquis Wellesley./LONDON/Printed for the Author by William Napier,/Musician in ordinary to his Majesty/Lisle Street, Leicester Square.

DEDICATION./TO HIS EXCELLENCY THE MOST NOBLE/RICHARD MARQUIS WELLESLEY, K.P./GOVERNOR GENERAL OF INDIA, CAPTAIN GENERAL, &c,&c,&c.

My Lord,

Without pretensions either to the Name or Talents of an Author, I yet presume to address an Epistle Dedicatory to your Lordship, trusting my Motive for so doing, will justify the Presumption of the Act.

Whatever Merit the indulgent Eye may ascribe to the musical Composition now offered to the Public, yet must I with heartfelt Gratitude acknowledge, that to your Lordship's kind Patronage and Example, I am greatly indebted for the Success attending my Publication.

The beautiful and sublime Poems of Ossian, from which I have selected the episode of Comala, for the subject of my Opera, are too generally known and admired by the Amateurs of Literature, among whom your lordship holds a distinguished Place, to require any comments on my Part.

Your Lordship's hereditary and acquired Taste for Music, exalted Character and distinguished Rank, were very powerful Incitements to my aspiring for the Honor of dedicating my Opera to your Lordship, whose condescending Acquiescence with my Request, has stampt an additional Value on the Work, and ushered it into the Musical World, with Credit and with Eclat.

I have the Honor to be,

My Lord,

With the most grateful Respect,

Your Lordship's

Much obliged, and most obedient humble Servant,

HARRIET STEWART.

Calcutta, August, 1803.