Berg-Sehn-Sucht. Der Alpenraum in der deutschsprachigen Literatur. Von Kathrin Geist. Paderborn: Fink, 2018. 326 pages. €69,00.

Abstract

well as the place of phenomenology and hermeneutics in literary theory. He includes Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Novalis, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, and Anne Germaine de Staël, as well as more modern writers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Roman Ingarden, and many more. Unfortunately, since the volume includes no index, one can easily get lost when attempting to pull together information concerning a particular person or topic; and it is furthermore not helpful that there is no bibliography. To be sure, MuellerVollmer’s extensive footnotes and the English-language abstracts that head each chapter go a long way toward remedying the situation; but it is frustrating that his occasional reference to further work that appeared after he had completed a particular manuscript, while seeming to suggest that he is pointing toward recent scholarship, fails to bring his readers up to date. Chapter Eight, for example, which first appeared in 1983, includes a footnote stating the manuscript was completed in the summer of 1979 and therefore could not take into consideration several contributions that appeared later in that same year! (173) And nothing is included that was published thereafter. As is customary with all of Mueller-Vollmer’s work, each chapter represents sound, solid, and compact scholarship, and each could potentially have become an entire volume in the bookshelf of another writer. This collection is to be recommended for any institutional or private library as a welcome addition to its resources.