Barker Fairley did his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Leeds and then proceeded to Jena for his doctorate. He was invited in 1910 to join the Faculty of the new University of Alberta, moved in 1915 to the University of Toronto and became over the next four decades Canada’s leading Germanist. Amongst his many publications on German and English Literature his crowning achievement was A Study of Goethe (1947), a pioneering attempt to understand Goethe’s inner development and a book that remains unsurpassed in the field. This present volume gathers together Barker Fairley’s essays on German Literature, written over a half a century and until now widely dispersed among the world’s scholarly journals.