Content area
Full Text
By a strange quirk of academic peripateia and scholarly inclination, the journal that has come to be synonymous with the University of Illinois and its Departments of English and Germanic Languages and Literatures was founded at Indiana University. The progenitor, Gustaf E. Karsten (I 850-1908), was a scholar whose academic credentials were established in 1884 at the University of Freiburg with a doctoral thesis on Old French consonant clusters ("Zur Geschichte der altfranzosischen ConsonantenVerbindungen").1 A Prussian by birth, he had studied at a series of distinguished German universities-Leipzig, Konigsberg, Heidelberg, Freiburg, Tubingen-and at Geneva, where he also taught for two years (1885-86). In 1887 he was appointed professor of Romance philology and Germanic languages at Indiana University. Nine years later Karsten announced that the "American Journal of Germanic Philology" was to commence publication in 1897.
When the first issue of the journal appeared, however, it carried the title of Journal of Germanic Philology The subsequent loss of the modifier "American" from its projected title presumably anticipated the fact that the journal never would be a domestic product. From the start and continuing to this day, its international orientation has been reflected in its board of editors and their scholarly interests; in an international cast of contributors and the international scope of their research; in the fact that even today the journal still publishes contributions in both English and German; and by virtue of the journal's worldwide distribution and readership. The very first issue heralded the catholic taste maintained throughout a century of publishing with a broad range of articles, including Elisabeth Woodbridge (Yale University) on "Chaucer's Classicism"; Horatio S. White (Cornell University) on "The Home of Walther von der Vogelweide"; George Hempl (University of Michigan) on "Middle English-wp-, -wo"; Edward P. Morton (Indiana University) on "Shakespeare in the Seventeenth Century"; Otto Heller (Washington University) on "Goethe and the Philosophy of Schopenhauer"; and Albert S. Cook (Yale University) on "The Sources of Two Similes in Chapman's The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois" and on "The College Teaching of English."
Until 19o6 the place of publication of the young journal reflected the restlessness of its founder and editor. While Volume 1 was published in Bloomington, Indiana, Volumes 2 and 3 appeared in Ithaca, New York, where Karsten held...