• ISSN Print: 2054-216X
• ISSN Digital: 2054-2178

Open Book Classics present lucid, accessible and free to access translations of literary works including our prize-winning multilingual edition of Denis Diderot’s influential Rameau’s Nephew, the multilingual anthologies The Idea of Europe: Enlightenment Perspectives and Tolerance: The Beacon of the Enlightenment, which was featured in The Guardian, Times Higher Education and elsewhere. These fresh and informative translations recover texts that have not recently been revived, or do not exist at all in a critical edition in English. Including cutting-edge interactive and multimedia resources, the literature is brought to life using musical recordings, hypertext annotations and vivid illustrations.

Laokoon, or: On the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry: (with notes and Paralipomena)

• Hugh Barr Nisbet
• Rosamond McKitterick
• Roger Paulin
• Michael Squire
• George Pliotis

FORTHCOMING

This volume presents a new English translation of Laokoon and the first English translation of the Paralipomena, both by the late H. B. Nisbet, the distinguished scholar of the German Enlightenment. Nisbet’s translation, recovered from his papers and prepared for publication by his colleagues, is accompanied by contextual materials reflecting his lifelong engagement with Lessing, Kant, Hegel, and Herder.

• European Studies
• History
• Literature

Xouth, The Ape: A Tale of Manners

• Iakovos Pitsipios
• Neo G. Christodoulides

'Xouth, the Ape', published in 1848 by Iakovos Pitsipios is a pioneering and satirical Greek novel that deftly blends humour, cultural critique, and biting social commentary. The novel is set in the aftermath of the Greek War of Independence. The story follows a young Greek man, desperate to present himself as a European aristocrat, who finds himself entangled with Xouth—an ape who is, in fact, a German travel writer transformed as punishment for his vanity and prejudices.

• European Studies
• European Studies: German Studies
• Literature

Maria Stuart

• Flora Kimmich
• Roger Paulin

Flora Kimmich’s new translation carefully preserves the spirit of the original: the pathos and passion of Mary in captivity, the high seriousness of Elizabeth’s ministers in council, and the robust comedy of that queen’s untidy private life. Notes to the text identify the many historical figures who appear in the text, describe the political setting of the action, and draw attention to the structure of the play.

• European Studies
• European Studies: German Studies
• Literature

Love and Intrigue: A Bourgeois Tragedy

• Flora Kimmich

Love and Intrigue, the third of Schiller’s canonical plays (after The Robbers and Fiesco’s Conspiracy at Genoa), belongs to the genre of domestic tragedy, with a small cast and an action indoors. It takes place as the highly conventional world of the late eighteenth century stands poised to erupt, and these tensions pervade its setting and emerge in its action. This lively play brims with comedy and tragedy expressed in a colorful, highly colloquial, sometimes scandalous prose well captured in Flora Kimmich’s skilled and informed translation. An authoritative essay by Roger Paulin introduces the reader to the play.

• European Studies
• European Studies: German Studies
• Literature

Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece

• Howard Gaskill

Friedrich Hölderlin’s only novel, Hyperion (1797–99), is a fictional epistolary autobiography that juxtaposes narration with critical reflection. In this skilful translation, Gaskill conveys the beautiful music and rhythms of Hölderlin’s language to an English-speaking reader.

• European Studies
• European Studies: German Studies
• Literature

Don Carlos Infante of Spain: A Dramatic Poem

• Friedrich Schiller
• Flora Kimmich

Schiller described Don Carlos as "a family portrait in a princely house.” It interweaves political machinations with powerful personal relationships to create a complex and resonant tragedy. The conflict between absolutism and liberty appealed not only to audiences but also to other artists and gave rise to several operas, not least to Verdi’s great Don Carlos of 1867. The play, which the playwright never finished to his satisfaction, lives on nonetheless among his best-loved works and is translated here with flair and skill by Flora Kimmich.

• European Studies
• Philosophy

Die Europaidee im Zeitalter der Aufklärung

• Rotraud von Kulessa
• Catriona Seth

Die Autoren und Philosophen der Aufklärung haben so bereits über die Möglichkeiten einer europäischen Einigung zwecks Sicherung des Friedens auf dem Kontinent nachgedacht. Die Texte der vorliegenden Anthologie, verfasst sowohl von den großen Denkern der Zeit (Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, Hume oder Germaine de Staël) wie auch von weniger bekannten oder gar in Vergessenheit geratenen, präsentieren, mit einigen chronologischen Exkursen (von Sully bis Victor Hugo), die Ideen der Denker eines weit gefassten 18. Jahrhunderts zu Europa, seiner Geschichte, seiner Vielfalt, aber auch zu den Gemeinsamkeiten der Nationen, die trotz ihrer Vielfalt eine geographische Einheit bilden.

• European Studies
• Philosophy

The Idea of Europe: Enlightenment Perspectives

• Catriona Seth
• Rotraud von Kulessa

The texts gathered here, and signed by major thinkers of the time (Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, Hume or Staël for instance), as well as by writers history has forgotten, present the reflections, with a couple of chronological extensions (from Sully to Victor Hugo) of authors from the long eighteenth century—the French Empire and the fall of Napoleon generated numerous upheavals—on Europe, its history, its diversity, but also on what the nations, which, in all their diversity, make up a geographical unit, have in common.

• European Studies
• Philosophy

L’idée de l’Europe: au Siècle des Lumières

• Rotraud von Kulessa
• Catriona Seth

Les textes, réunis dans cette anthologie, et signés des grands écrivains du temps (Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, Hume ou encore Staël), comme d’oubliés de l’histoire, présentent, avec quelques excursus chronologiques (de Sully à Hugo) les réflexions de penseurs d’un dix-huitième siècle aux bornes chronologiques étendues – l’émergence et la chute de l’Empire engendrent des bouleversements nombreux –, sur l’Europe, son histoire, sa diversité, mais aussi sur ce qu’ont en commun les nations qui composent, dans leur variété, un ensemble géographique.

• European Studies
• European Studies: German Studies
• Literature

Wallenstein: A Dramatic Poem

• Friedrich Schiller
• Flora Kimmich

The Wallenstein trilogy, formally innovative and modern beyond its time, is a brilliant study of power, ambition and betrayal. In this new translation—the latest in a long line of distinguished English translations of the play, starting with Coleridge's in Schiller's lifetime—Flora Kimmich succeeds in rendering what is often a difficult source text into language that is at once accessible and enjoyable.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Philosophy

Denis Diderot 'Rameau's Nephew' - 'Le Neveu de Rameau': A Multi-Media Bilingual Edition

• Denis Diderot
• Marian Hobson
• Kate E. Tunstall
• Caroline Warman

Denis Diderot's Rameau's Nephew has achieved a literary-philosophical status that no other work by Diderot shares. This interactive, multi-media edition offers not only a brand new translation of Diderot's famous dialogue but provides portraits and biographies of the numerous individuals mentioned in the text, allowing a window onto the complex social and political context that forms the backdrop to the dialogue. Links to musical pieces selected by Pascal Duc and performed by students of the Conservatoire nationale de musique, Paris, illuminate the wider musical context of the work, enlarging it far beyond its now widely understood relation to opéra comique.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• Philosophy

Tolerance: The Beacon of the Enlightenment

• Caroline Warman
• Caroline Warman

This anthology contains fiery extracts by forty eighteenth-century authors, from the most famous philosophers of the age to those whose brilliant writings are less well-known. These passages are immensely diverse in style and topic, but all have in common a passionate commitment to equality, freedom, and tolerance. First published by the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations as an act of solidarity and as a response to the surge of interest in Enlightenment values, Tolerance has now been translated by over 100 students and tutors of French at Oxford University.

• European Studies
• European Studies: German Studies
• Literature

Fiesco's Conspiracy at Genoa

• Friedrich Schiller
• Flora Kimmich

Within two years of the success of his first play Die Räuber on the German stage in 1781, Schiller wrote a drama based on a rebellion in sixteenth century Italy, its title: The Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa. A Republican Tragedy. With Fiesco as tragic hero Schiller examines the complex entanglement of morality and politics in his own times that was to preoccupy him throughout his career. There have been some noteworthy productions on the German stage and television, even if it has remained somewhat in the shadow of Schiller’ other works. In the English-speaking world it is all but unknown and very seldom performed. This translation aims to remedy that oversight.

• European Studies
• European Studies: French Studies
• History

On History: Introduction to World History (1831); Opening Address at the Faculty of Letters, 9 January 1834; Preface to History of France (1869)

• Jules Michelet
• Lionel Gossman
• Edward K. Kaplan
• Flora Kimmich

One of the great Romantic historians, Jules Michelet served as a model and inspiration for the founders of the influential Annales school in France. This volume, consisting of three programmatic essays by Michelet with an introduction by Lionel Gossman, offers Anglophone historians a sense of this important historian’s worldview and the values underlying all his historiographical work. Taken together, the three texts can be read as a kind of manifesto of Romantic historiography, laying out a grand vision of history, what it means, why it matters, and why it is important for historians to have a lively sense of it.