What is the Baroque? Where did it come from and where did it go? Why do we have to ask these questions? Because art historians seem largely satisfied with their answers and most scholars of German literature are not satisfied, yet have stopped asking. This book discerns in the Baroque an aesthetic phenomenon that crosses both media and national boundaries in its celebration of excess and its disintegration of system, unity, and identity. The compositional principles and theoretical implications of the Baroque, as it first arose in Italian art, find expression in German poetics, drama, poetry, and narrativeexpression accessible only through resolute close reading. Readings of Bernini, Borromini, Velázquez, Rubens, Fracanzano, and de Hooch precipitate readings of Opitz, Gryphius, Fleming, Zesen, Hoffmannswaldau, and Grimmelshausen, demonstrating that seventeenth-century German literature both is Baroque and confirms what the Baroque is.

Peter J. Burgard studierte Germanistik, Kunstgeschichte und Philosophie an der Johns Hopkins University, Rechtswissenschaft in Köln, Germanistik und Anglistik in Bonn und Germanistik an der University of Virginia. Seit 1989 lehrt und forscht er als Professor an der Harvard University in Boston zur deutschen Literatur-, Kunst- und Geistesgeschichte.