On the Literature and Thought of the German Classical Era

Foreword		vii

1.	Lucretius in Eighteenth-Century Germany: With a Commentary on Goethe’s Poem ‘Metamorphosis of Animals’	3
2.	On the Rise of Toleration in Europe: Lessing and the German Contribution	35
3.	On the Function of Mystification in Lessing’s Masonic Dialogues, Ernst and Falk	57
4.	The Rationalisation of the Holy Trinity from Lessing to Hegel	81
5.	Lessing and Misogyny: Die Matrone von Ephesus	109
6.	The German Reception of an Irish Eccentric: The Controversy over Thomas Amory’s The Life of John Buncle, Esq. (1778–79)	129
7.	Herder’s The Oldest Document of the Human Race and his Philosophy of Religion and History	145
8.	The Ethical Foundation of Goethe’s Scientific Thought	163
9.	Natural History and Human History in Goethe, Herder, and Kant	179
10.	Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’: A Reappraisal	215
11.	Laocoon in Germany: The Reception of the Group since Winckelmann	241

List of Illustrations		291
Bibliography		295
Index		321

Contents