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 the history of literature, culture and knowledge from the early modern period to modernity. Her main areas of research include machine literature; knowledge (science) and gender 1500-1900; early modern entertainment literature; intercultural constructions of knowledge (images of Italy); censorship. She also researches the literary history of Kassel, for which she published the "Kleine Kasseler Literatur-Lexikon. Authors" at the beginning of the year.

Gotthelf Wilhelm Christoph Starke (1762-1830), a poet and theologian from Anhalt-Bernburg, 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), which made him famous far beyond the borders of the small central German principality of Anhalt-Bernburg, even being translated into French, English, Dutch, Swedish and Russian. Working first as a teacher and 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 stories and hymns, sensitive poems in folk song and antique meters, poetic and programmatic sermons, prayers, sayings and scenes. They provide an insight into the diversity of his work and invite you to rediscover it.

Further information about the book can be found here.