Literary Networks and the Transmission of German Literature and Ideas in Britain, 1756-1806

Literary groups and publishing networks played a crucial role in the transmission of German literature and ideas in Britain during a period of political upheaval, from the Seven Years' War (1756-63) to the aftermath of the French Revolution. Drawing on a range of printed and manuscript sources, Catherine Angerson examines how different groups responded to German authors, their motivations for translating or promoting German texts and the ways in which ideas were debated and disseminated. Rational Dissenters in England turned to German authors for philosophical arguments supporting their own demands for political reform and religious freedom, while Scottish lawyers engaged with linguistic affinities and moral-philosophical questions posed by German dramatists such as Friedrich Schiller. A third group, the arch-conservative Anti-Jacobins, opposed the cosmopolitanism of Dissenting publishers, translators and reviewers who promoted German literature and philosophy to the journal-reading public. The book reveals new aspects of the varied reception, translation and mediation of German texts among Anglophone audiences in the late Enlightenment and early Romantic period.