Pretexts for Writing

German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and Philosophy

Seán M. Williams

2019
242 pages
$37.95
ISBN 9781684480524
New Studies in the Age of Goethe

Around 1800, print culture became a particularly rich source for metaphors about thinking as well as writing, nowhere more so than in the German tradition of Dichter und Denker. Goethe, Jean Paul, and Hegel (among many others) used the preface in order to reflect on the problems of writing itself, and its interpretation. If Sterne teaches us that a material book enables mind games as much as it gives expression to them, the Germans made these games more theoretical still. Weaving in authors from Antiquity to Agamben, Williams shows how European - and, above all, German - Romanticism was a watershed in the history of the preface. The playful, paradoxical strategies that Romantic writers invented are later played out in continental philosophy, and in post-Structuralist literature. The preface is a prompt for playful thinking with texts, as much as it is conventionally the prosaic product of such an exercise.

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Reviews
"Williams's Pretexts for Writing is a welcome contribution to recent scholarship on the print and intellectual culture of German Romanticism as well as on theories of paratextuality. . . . His inductive approach, attuned to the local specificities of each text, enriches his individual case studies, while his broader interest in questions of reception and address, the pragmatics of persuasion, and self-reflexivity forms a largely coherent throughline." - Goethe Yearbook, 2022

"This book is perceptive, timely, and ambitious: perceptive in that it zeroes in on serious gaps in research, the exploration of which may alter our views of eighteenth-century German literature. . . . Pretexts for Writing is one of these books that come across as obvious; one may wonder, why this has not been done before, as the preface, of course, is a genre that encapsulates eighteenth century literary transformations. Yet simultaneously, it turns out to be totally surprising and invigorating, as we come to realize that prefaces were really that relevant and interesting." - Lessing Yearbook /Jahrbuch, December 2021

"Pretexts for Writing discusses the history of the literary and philosophical self-authored preface in the German speaking world around 1800 with an intensity and analytical depth previously unachieved in scholarship." - Till Dembeck, University of Luxembourg

"Williams's book is a study of tremendous academic rigor with original insights. It shows deep knowledge of both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature and philosophy and the many conversations in contemporary literary studies pertaining to them. It is an achievement in scholarship pertaining to the age of Goethe, romanticism, and literary studies at large." - The German Quarterly, Spring 2020

"To say that Williams has done his homework on the literary and philosophical preface would be putting the matter at its very mildest. Not alone has he immersed himself in the prefatorial writings (across multiple editions) of his focal triumvirate of German titans (Goethe, Jean Paul, Hegel), he has also engaged with a comparative and cross-disciplinary tradition reaching back to antiquity and forward all the way to poststructuralism." - Modern Language Review, July 2020

About the author:

Seán M. Williams is a lecturer in German and European cultural history in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sheffield, UK, following an appointment as Vice-Chancellor's Fellow. He was previously lecturer ("wissenschaftlicher Assistent") in German and comparative literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He has publishedon German literature and philosophy around 1800, in comparative contexts.

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Cloth: $150.00, 978-1-6844-8053-1; EPUB: $37.95, 978-1-6844-8054-8