German Literature of the Eighteenth Century

New essays tracing the 18th-century literary revival in German-speaking lands and the cultural developments that accompanied it. The Enlightenment was based on the use of reason, common sense, and "natural law," and was paralleled by an emphasis on feelings and the emotions in religious, especially Pietist circles. Progressive thinkers in England, France, and later in Germany began to assail the absolutism of the state and the orthodoxy of the Church; in Germany the line led from Leibniz, Thomas