The Shepherd, the Volk, and the Middle Class

ELYSTAN GRIFFITHS is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in German Studies at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of the monographs Political Change and Human Emancipation in the Works of Heinrich von Kleist (2005) and The Shepherd, the Volk, and the Middle Class: Transformations of Pastoral in German-Language Writing, 1750-1850 (2020). Along with David Hill, he published the first complete edition of J.M.R. Lenz's writings on social and military reform, based on extensive manuscript holdings in Kraków, Berlin and Riga. He is currently working on a project on the relationship between obedience and agency in German culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.