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Van Cleve, John W.
Dr. John W. Van Cleve holds a Ph.D. in German literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He currently teaches at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
2019 1-4955-0737-3The plays in this volume are from the 1740s. Works from the early literary Enlightenment respond not only to the demand of educated people for rational responses to real-world situations but also to a new desire within the developing middle class to read about recognizable joys, sorrows and tensions within families and between husbands and wives. The audience for this literature held those expectations, and playwrights tried to satisfy them on the contemporary stage.
2020 1-4955-0982-6
Julius of Taranto and The Twins> first appeared during a brief literary movement that launched the career of Germany’s finest writer, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and set the direction taken by the literature, art and music of the West during the nineteenth century, Romanticism. That German movement, commonly styled “Sturm und Drang,” or “Storm and Stress,” begins in the latest 1760s and is coming to an end by 1780. It is in German literature of the 1790s that European Romanticism first emerged fully formed, and for over a century scholars have cited the debt that Romanticism owes to Storm and Stress.
2024 1-4955-1256-8
This is an English translation by John W. Van Cleve. Baron Adolph Franz Ludwig von Knigge was born in 1752 in Bredenbeck, a small town in the Electorate of Hanover, a small state within the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. ...Adolph Knigge has long been familiar to German-speaking Europe primarily as the author of a deportment and etiquette guide whose impact there was significant. Otherwise, his activity as sole or contributing author extended to over twenty additional book titles, most of which offered readers a view of the world that was deeply influenced by Enlightenment thinking and liberal politics. -John W. Van Cleve ("Translator's Preface")
Fables and Tales by the German Aesop, C.f. Gellert (1715-1769): A Moral Teacher of the German Nation
2013 0-7734-4514-5These are translations of fables and tales written by C.F. Gellert. Gellert was an eighteenth century folklorist whose work has been canonized. Critics have argued that the stories are fundamentally homegrown and come from the German people (the “Volk”), and they speak directly to the heart of the people. These works are used less often for moral instruction in contemporary society, something the author laments, but are still important components of German folklore.
2017 1-4955-0548-0
Novel is a translation of the German book known as Insel Felsenburg originally published in 1731. Its narrative was first suggested by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). This German version presents a man and woman shipwrecked on an island in the South Atlantic. They marry and with their children establish a utopian society.
2024 1-4955-1308-4
The Fables and Tales and the Swedish Countess were ensconced in the German canon of literature well into the nineteenth century. But Gellert’s renown faded in the twentieth, a development that can be traced in part to the profound disillusionment and cynicism that set in after the World Wars and the Holocaust. It is understandable that the continent that produced philosophical optimism in the eighteenth century and Auschwitz in the twentieth would find much of the thinking of Enlightenment figures like Gellert naïve, even passé. Saxony was one of the many states large and small that belonged to the vast and slowly failing Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, the capital of which was Vienna.
2022 1-4955-0943-5
The Voyage of an Earth Inhabitant to Mars, by Carl Ignatius Geiger (1790), disappeared for over a century and a half. This translation with commentary by John W. Van Cleve revives this book written allegorically about the U.S. Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary period.
2018 1-4955-0647-9
Along with G.E. Lessing, and the famous pair, Goethe and Schiller, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813) is a member of the pantheon of German eighteenth-century writers. The plays of Wieland's youth have not appeared in English translation until now.
2022 1-4955-0986-9
These two plays by F.M. Klinger were written during the "Sturm und Drang" or "Storm and Stress" German literary movement (from the 1760-s to 1780). A friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Klinger is remembered for his early tragedies, especially for Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) of 1776, the work that gave the movement of young writers its name" (pg. iii).