Presents, in an immensely readable yet profoundly scholarly account, the history of German literature from the Reformation and Renaissance to the late twentieth century, in the wider context of Germanic culture, over the whole German-speaking area of Europe.

Eda Sagarra is Professor and Head of the Department of Germanic Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. Her books include A Social History of Germany (1977), Germany in the Nineteenth Century (1980), and Theodore Fontane: Der Stechlin (1986). Peter Skrine is Professor of German at the University of Bristol. His works include (with Lilian Furst) Naturalism (1971), The Baroque: Literature and Culture in Seventeenth Century Europe (1978), and Hauptmann, Wedekind and Schnitzler (1989).