Affecting Grace

Affecting Grace examines the importance of Shakespeares poetry and plays within German literature and thought after 1750 including its relationship to German classicism, which favoured unreflected ease over theatricality. Kenneth S. Calhoon examines this tension against an extensive backdrop that includes a number of canonical German authors Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing, von Kleist, and Nietzsche as well as the advent of Meissen porcelain, the painting of Bernardo Bellotto and Francesco Guardi, and aspects of German styles of architecture. Extending from Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice (c. 1597) to Kleists The Broken Jug (1806), this study turns on the paradox that the German literary world had begun to embrace Shakespeare just as it was firming up the broad but pronounced anti-Baroque sensibility found pivotally in Lessings critical and dramatic works. Through these investigations, Calhoon illuminates the deep cultural changes that fundamentally affected Germanys literary and artistic traditions.