From Being-Itself to Post-Modernism - four decades of literature and literary criticism in the Federal Republic of Germany, Helmut Kreuzer; the unacknowledged legislator of the text - some observations on literary criticism in the Federal Republic of Germany, Hans J.Hahn; towards a systematic outline of an integrative theory of literary history, Michael Titzmann; the reception of sociological theory by West German literary scholarship 1970-85, J rg Sch nert; Hans Robert Jauss's Rezeptions sthetik - theory and application, Margot Zutshi; a feminist approach to Kafka's The Castle, Elizabeth Boa; women writing about women writing and Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina; the politics of literature in the GDR - a post-structuralist approach, Chris Weedon; unholy families - the Oedipal psychopathology of four expressionist Ich-Dramen, Richard Sheppard; deconstructing classicism - Goethe's Helena and the need to rhyme, Anthony Phelan; the poetry of August Stramm - a suitable case for deconstruction, Richard Sheppard; the potential and limits of a Marxist methodology for Germanistik, David Jenkinson; from Althusser to Brecht - formalism, materialism, and The Threepenny Opera, Steve Giles; upstairs - downstairs - some reflections on German literature in the light of Bakhtin's Theory of Carnival, Richard Sheppard.