Johann Gottfried Herder: Dramatische Werke

Johann Gottfried Herder as a playwright: this critical edition opens up a new field of research. For the first time, it encompasses Herder’s entire dramatic work, including drafts, fragments and unpublished texts, some of which are purely dramatic in nature, whilst others bear witness to Herder’s experiments with the genres of dramatic poetry and musical theatre. The two volumes present all the facsimiles and their transcriptions, tracing Herder’s creative process. His unfinished thinking is at the focus and is of interdisciplinary interest. The second volume includes all the works Herder wrote in Weimar, from 1776 until his death in 1803 – a period marked by his keen interest in Greek tragedy and mythology and fuelled by the classical aesthetic debates led mainly by Goethe and Schiller.