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Tuska Benes's rich and erudite new work covers more territory than the title might suggest. But then, that is her prime goal, to show the centrality of the academic study of language and languages to the broader cultural projects of nineteenth-century Germany, and indeed beyond. The book's most important contribution is therefore in applying insights from the history of linguistics to wider questions of German intellectual and cultural history, and in bringing some important but neglected names from the various subdisciplines of nineteenth-century German philology back into the historical mainstream. Some of the details of sound shifts and linguistic systems will appeal primarily to specialists, but there is much here for German historians at large; scholars interested in the origins and development of structuralism, poststructuralism, and the linguistic turns might find the argument stimulating as well.
The book explores two main topics. The first portrays the ways in which language "became a powerful and enduring metaphor for the representation of national culture in Germany," with Germany claimed as "the quintessential case of language study contributing to the rise of modern nationalism" (p. 4). Second, the work makes the case that scholars need to trace the roots of the mid twentieth-century linguistic turns not just to Nietzsche and Saussure, but to their immediate predecessors and in fact all the way back to ideas of the linguistic construction of culture and of individual subjectivity associated with the rise of comparative and historical philology in Germany in the decades before and around 1800. For broader context, Benes was particularly...