John Walker, ed., The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature; Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle. London: Legenda, for Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2013. xii + 204 pp.

Summary

A festschrift honors someone or some event and also recognizes the celebrants, the members of a select community. The person being celebrated here is Nicholas Boyle, immediately familiar for his magisterial Goethe biography, of which two volumes have appeared so far. He is less well known for his concerns about the current state of the world of learning—and of the world—as signaled by his Who Are We Now? Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney (1998) and by his 2014: How to Survive the Next World Crisis (2010). The wide range of Boyle's interests does not exceed the capable reach of the fifteen contributors to this volume, although the whole does demand sturdy readers, ranging as it does across German literature from the Baroque to Thomas Mann but also including Shakespeare, Les Murray, and Seamus Heaney.

More than half of the contributions deal directly or tangentially with Goethe. John A. McCarthy's “Cognitive Mapping: Adam, Venus, and Faust” is a complex discussion that brings together the most recent neuroscience with paintings by Michelangelo and Giorgione to shed light on Faust. The short essay by T. J. Reed, “Goethe as Secular Icon,” is part of a long-standing disagreement with Boyle's interpretation of Goethe the poet. It is a supplement to the critical review of the biography Reed published in 2001; he proposes that Goethe's stance was marked by “delighted assent” (47) and not just by absences. Charlotte Lee's contribution is “Mignon and the Idea of the Secret.” Regina Sachers shows unexpected parallels between Goethe's “Urworte. Orphisch” and Mörike's “Besuch in Urach.” Ritchie Robertson touches on, among other things, Egmont and Die natürliche Tochter in assessing Goethe and Machiavelli. Martin Swales compares Iphigenie auf Tauris and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale in “The Human Epiphany.”

Christoph Jamme in “Enlightened Mythology: Thomas Mann and Myth” and John Walker in “Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus and the Site of Literature” deal with a question that remains alive for modern literature: namely, what the role of myth can or should be. Walker connects this with Boyle's concern for “the theological and cultural meaning of the secularization of the Christian tradition” (109). The triangulation of the relationship between theology, literature, and mythology continues to be a pressing issue.