Global City Eclipses Small Town, or How to Tell a New Story of Eighteenth-Century (German) Literature

In a departure from both nationalizing histories of German literature and existing approaches for positioning German literature vis-à-vis other European and World literature, this essay introduces global/local as a conceptual pair for re-imagining telling the story of eighteenth-century (German) literature. It previous a forthcoming book, and by working with the example of Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767-1769), the essay models how different acts of translation reposition literature vis-à-vis urban and global contexts.