This book presents 14 essays ranging widely from Wolfram’s Parzival to Hamlet; from the poetry of Goethe and Rilke to the prose of Kafka and Mann. The volume is not a bouquet of scattered pieces, but possesses an inner unity and an unusual consistency in its approach to literary-historical and aesthetic problems. To quote from Professor Ziolkowski’s introduction: The name on the title page is a warranty of scholarly excellence.