THESE OUTLINES are designed to supply a want which Outlines of German Literature (1873) is a book on German literature by Joseph Gostwick and Robert Harrison.ĪUTHOR OF A HANDBOOK OF AMERICAN LITERATURE ' The taste and, to some extent, the moral character of the majority of readers were represented by such writers as Vulpius, Spiess, Cramer, Lafontaine, Kotzebue, and Clauren, whose fictions enjoyed a popularity extended over more than a quarter of a century."- Outlines of German Literature (1873) by Joseph Gostwick and Robert Harrison If we could be deceived by the prominence given in literary history to such names as Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, and Fichte, or could suppose that they expressed the mind of a nation, the question might arise : How could a people represented by such men fall into the political degradation in which Germany was found at the beginning of the present century ? There existed, in fact, no such contrast as such a question would imply between the intellectual and the political condition of the people. The Low Literature represented by these names, and including a host of bad romances and plays, enjoyed an extensive popularity during Schiller's time, and survived for several years after the War of Liberation.
He was followed, at a later time, by Heun, who used the pseudonyme Clauren, and ruled in the circulating libraries as Kotzebue ruled on the stage. " Abällino' and ' Rinaldo Rinaldini' were both respectable when compared with some of the romances written by CRAMER and LAFONTAINE especially some stories of domestic life by the latter, who wrote more than one hundred and thirty volumes of unwholesome fiction, made worse by the insertion of false moral reflections. "The best works of Goethe and Schiller were not, at first, patronised by the German people, but were written in defiance of a popular taste which was satisfied with the dramatic writings of Kotzebue and Iffland, to say nothing of Rinaldo Rinaldini and the rest of the deplorable robber-romances of the time."- Outlines of German Literature (1873) by Joseph Gostwick and Robert Harrison
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