PUBLICATIONS OF THE ENGLISH GOETHE SOCIETY. Pounds 15 per year. The English Goethe Society, PO Box YR7, Leeds LS9 7UU.

Most European countries and cultures have their great . . . their canonical authors. Often one name stands in a position of unchallenged pre-eminence:

Shakespeare in England, Dante in Italy, Cervantes in Spain, Moliere in France, and Goethe in Ger many." So writes Martin Swales in the 1997 issue of the annual Publications of the English Goethe Society (Vol ume 66), establishing Goethe's claim to cultural authority in the land of his birth and justifying the modern reader's engagement with his rich and varied corpus. That Goethe was one of the most original writers and thinkers in any language in the past 250 years cannot be doubted today, but such a view was not always taken for granted.

In the same volume, E. S. Shaffer writes of the lasting impression Goethe's life and literature made on George Eliot: "every aspect of her work owes much to the fructifying influence of Goethe . " It was an enthusiasm she shared with George Lewes , with whom she collaborated on his Life of Goethe (1855), the first biography of Goethe in English or German. But as Shaffer points out, few at that time would admit to such enthusiasm: "No new writer in England could openly enlist under his banner and hope to gain anything but a large meed of prejudiced resistance."

Thankfully , times have changed, as has been demonstrated by the enthusiastic reviews and, indeed, sales of Nicholas Boyle's two-volume Goethe: The Poet and the Age (reviewed in the TLS , May 10, 1991, and February 11, 2000).

Founded in 1886 "for the purpose of promoting the study of Goethe's work and thought", the English Goethe Society has kept the flame of Goethe scholarship burning brightly. Its journal (known to aficionados as PEGS ) publishes the lectures given to the Society in the genteel Georgian townhouse in Russell Square that is home to the Institute of Germanic Studies. The main focus of the journal - the acme of British research on the Goethezeit - is to cast new light on Goethe's texts and the context of contemporary science, history and philosophy that this most multidisciplinary of writers drew on to construct his aesthetic world-view.

The last four issues have featured papers by, among others, T. J. Reed (the President of the EGS) on Goethe's individualistic interpretation of the Enlightenment; Elizabeth Boa on the pastoral epic Hermann und Dorothea (1797) as an example of Heimatliteratur ; and R. H. Stephenson (who has pioneered research into Goethe's aphoristic style) examining Goethe's prose in his literary and scientific work. Stephenson aptly applies Ezra Pound's definition of poetic intensity as "abnormal vigour" to describe the rich allusiveness and complexity of Goethe's style, which led Hofmannsthal to accuse him of "hiding his depths on the surface".