Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Heine, Heinrich (Vol. 147) - Jeffrey L. Sammons (essay date 1992)

Jeffrey L. Sammons (essay date 1992)

SOURCE: Sammons, Jeffrey L. “In the Freedom Stall Where the Boors Live Equally: Heine in America.” In The Fortunes of German Writers in America: Studies in Literary Reception, edited by Wolfgang Elfe, James Hardin, and Gunther Holst, pp. 41-68. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Sammons presents an overview of Heine's reception by American writers and critics.]

The topic of Heine in America, like, I assume, several others to be discussed at this conference, is a matter of three distinguishable if overlapping constituencies: immigrants and their descendants whose mother tongue is German; educated Americans whose mother tongue is English but who are well acquainted with German language and literature; and Americans deprived of these benefits for whom German writers must be mediated in English. Of these three constituencies, the first may well have been the...

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