from the Foreword:
This Glossary is designed for use by undergraduate students as an initial source of information. It does not replace any of the existing excellent Sachwörterbücher. It is however useful in that it aims specifically to provide a ready and inexpensive source of reference for English-speaking students and for scholars of other disciplines with only a limited knowledge of German, who are confronted with technical terms from German literary scholarship.

In order to keep the size and the cost of the Glossary within bounds appropriate to undergraduate students, it has been necessary to make a selection of the most commonly encountered literary terms. Bearing in mind the needs of English-speaking students, we have excluded terms which are synonymous in German and English, and also literary terms of relevance only to non-German literatures; we have tried to concentrate on important or typical German literary terms, on terms which are used in different ways in English and German, e.g.: Romantik, Fiktion, Literaturkritik, Vers etc., and on certain terms of a technical nature, such as metrical terms, or terms derived from Greek and Latin, such as the names of the Muses, which are the same in German and English, but are largely unknown to present-day students. Any selection is of course arbitrary and can be criticized for sins of omission and commission. Editors faced with the need to select can only adhere to certain guiding principles and use their discretion.