A History of German Literature

"In writing this volume, it was my task to compress more than a thousand years of literary history into a volume of about four hundred pages. The book was not to be a collection of sheaths garnered here and there in favorite fields, but a real history, dealing with the whole subject coherently and with due regard to the relative importance of periods, writers, and writings..." - Calvin Thomas

"The history of German literature, as a connected account of writings that have literary interest and are extant in the German language, begins about the year 800. It is true that for many centuries prior to that time Germans had been producing poetry in abundance, but it was not written down, and only one late fragment of it has been preserved. A system of alphabetic writing, the so-called runes, may possibly have been in use among the High Germans, but if so the letters were always cut on wood, metal, or stone, and were not employed for what would now be called literary purposes. It was not until Christianity came in, bringing the Latin alphabet and a class of men acquainted with the use of pen, ink, and parchment, that anything of literary value was written down in German..." - Calvin Thomas

Contents: The Legacy of Paganism. Religious Poetry of the Ninth Century. From Monasticism to Chivalry. The Indigenous Epic of the Middle Ages. The Exotic Romances of Knighthood. The Minnesingers. The Age of Expiring Chivalry. The Lutheran Revolt in its Literary Aspect. Drama, Fiction, and Satire in the Sixteenth Century. Opitz And His Train. Between the Great Wars. Klopstock and Wieland. Lessing and Herder. The Young Goethe and the "Storm and Stress". The Birth of the New Poetic Drama. The Great Days of Weimar. The Rise of the Romantic School and the War Against Napoleon. The Era of Romanticism. The Middle of the Nineteenth Century. Some Recent Developments.