Georg Forster: A History of His Critical Reception

Johann Georg Adam Forster (1754-1794) accompanied James Cook on his second voyage (1772-1775) and became a Jacobin (1792-1793). His distinctly European outlook as a cultural mediator between England, France, and Germany in scientific and political terms explains, to a large degree, the difficulties that German literary critics had in dealing with Forster’s nonfiction writing. The first part of this book relates readings - spanning from the late 1790s through 1989 - of Forster’s life and work to the development of institutionalized German studies; the second part discusses the secondary literature on individual texts by Forster guiding the reader to the most important critical analyses.