Description:
A revisionist literary and intellectual history of Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Brief description: Todd Kontje is Distinguished Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of four books, including Georg Forster: German Cosmopolitan, winner of the 2023 DAAD/GSA Prize for the Best Book in Literature and Cultural Studies.
Review Quotes:
"Kontje shows how writers of the German eighteenth century came to an increasingly global understanding of the world organized around ideas of mobility and motion. He thereby foregrounds specific genres and formats (travel writing, autobiography, collected works editions, etc.) that 'centrifugally' directed eighteenth-century readers out toward the world in contrast to the 'centripetal' pull of works projecting a more limited idea of national culture."
--Sean B. Franzel, co-editor of Taking Stock: Media Inventories in the German Nineteenth Century