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07/31/2023 | Publication

Nikola Roßbach (Ed.): Gotthelf Wilhelm Christoph Starke: Paintings and Other Texts

New publication: Nikola Roßbach is Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Kassel. She researches and teaches on the history of literature, culture, and knowledge from the early modern period to the modern era. Her research interests include machine literature; knowledge(schaft) and gender 1500-1900; early modern entertainment literature; intercultural constructions of knowledge (images of Italy); censorship. In addition, she researches the literary history of Kassel, on which she published earlier this year the "Kleine Kasseler Literatur-Lexikon. Authors."

Gotthelf Wilhelm Christoph Starke (1762-1830), an Anhalt-Bernburg poet and theologian, was considered a classic in his time, but is virtually unknown today. It is worth rediscovering his Gemählde aus dem häuslichen Leben and Erzählungen (1793-1804), with which he became known far beyond the borders of the small central German principality of Anhalt-Bernburg, and was even translated into French, English, Dutch, Swedish and Russian. Working first as a teacher, then as a preacher, he was a versatile writer. In addition to stories, he wrote poems and songs, school writings and treatises, sermons, speeches, and dramatic scenes.
This volume brings together 45 very different texts by Starke from the years 1785 to 1830: cheerfully humorous and psychologically profound stories, comic verse narratives and church hymns, sensitive poems in folk-song tone and antic meters, poetic and programmatic sermons, prayers, sayings, and scenes. They provide a glimpse into the diversity of his work and invite rediscovery.

For more information about the book, click here.