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A Companion to the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Ed. Barbara Fischer & Thomas C. Fox. New York: Camden House, 2005. 410 pp. £55/$99. ISBN 1571132430, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 43, Issue 1, JANUARY 2007, Page 97, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cql133
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This volume delivers on its promises by gathering together contributions from some of the world's leading Lessing scholars and by introducing the reader to all important works and their reception until the present. Without a doubt, Lessing was one of the most prolific writers of his time, and his influence on German and European thought and cultural history cannot be underestimated. This book presents a very welcome concise and knowledgeable overview which will be extremely useful to scholars and students of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the father of the German bürgerliches Trauerspiel, scholar, polemicist and playwright. Meyer's, Kertscher's and Fox's chapters on Lessing on stage since 1945 deserve to be highlighted because in the Anglophone world we too often resign to treating Lessing's works as Lesedramen, which they were never intended to be. The methods represented in this volume reach from Nisbet's tried and tested history of philosophy to Wurst's gender-studies approach and should satisfy most discerning readers.