Product Description: McLelland's pioneering study charts the history of foreign language learning and teaching in the UK over five centuries (1500-2000), taking German as her case study. From the first grammar of German for English speakers, published in 1680, McLelland traces the growth in interest in German for travel and trade, and its rapid increase in prestige in the eighteenth century as a language of literary merit, before German became established in schools and universities from the second quarter of the nineteenth century onwards...read more

Product Description: This monograph offers a comprehensive reassessment of the dominant German grammarian of the 17th century J.G. Schottelius, and examines his legacy both in Germany and Europe. Offers comprehensive documentation of Schottelius’s numerous sources to show the range and limits of scholarly knowledge in 17th-century Germany Introduces new data that provides insight into whether a grammarian like Schottelius could have any impact on how people actually wrote Provides an accessible reading of Schottelius’s landmark study (with quotations translated into English) that does not assume prior knowledge of the seventeenth-century German context Traces Schottelius’s influence on Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and Russian grammar ...read more

Product Description: The articles assembled here discuss humanism as a concept and phenomenon in the literature of the Middle Ages and the early modern age. With reference to authors, genres, and various reception phenomena, the authors set out to identify a humanistic matrix in 15th and 16th century German literature with a view to confirming or problematizing the concept as a signature of the epoch...read more

This volume presents fourteen case studies of standardization processes in eleven different Germanic languages. Together, the contributions confront problematic issues in standardization which will be of interest to sociolinguists, as well as to historical linguists from all language disciplines. The papers cover a historical range from the Middle Ages to the present and a geographical range from South Africa to Iceland, but all fall into one of the following categories: 1) shaping and diffusing a standard language; 2) the relationship between standard and identity; 3) non-standardization, de-standardization and re-standardization.

Product Description: Ulrich von Zatzikhoven's Lanzelet, written around the turn of the thirteenth century, has long intrigued scholars both within and outside German studies: the only remaining trace of a Lancelot legend free of the adulterous affair with Guinevere, it has been seen both as a precursor of classical Arthurian romance in Germany, and as a post-classical imitation, and attempts to interpret it have often run foul of its contradictions...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)