"Gottfried Keller and his Critics: A Case Study in Scholarly Criticism" by Richard Ruppel, has been published by Camden House, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. of Rochester (N.Y.) and Suffolk England. The publication consummates a five-year project that has included extensive research particularly in the Gottfried Keller Archive located in Z�rich, Switzerland, and throughout libraries and archives in Europe.

Keller, as many critics have argued, has become the greatest author to emerge from 19th century Switzerland and one of the most prominent writing in German during the mid-19th century. His fiction, particularly his novellas, are still widely read in Europe and in college-level German programs across North America.

The book explores 150 years of the most important scholarship and criticism on Keller and his fiction. Ruppel hopes that his book will serve students, scholars and readers in the years to come, because it discusses the most important schools of thought, trends and representative critical perspectives on Keller's fiction and poetry.

In the opening chapters, the author attempts to capture the literary industry of Keller's day, to show what it was like to be an author in an age of great industrial expansion and increasing literacy among the European general populace. The early chapters also shed light on Keller's correspondence with fellow authors and publishers and reveals his reactions to his critics who were professors of philosophy, history and aesthetics, who practiced an early form of journalistic criticism in the newly emerging field of literary criticism.

Chapters three and four concentrate on the emerging field of literary criticism, and reveal how literary historians interpreted his fiction. These chapters also trace the founding of the Gottfried Keller Literary Society which in turn produced the first definitive critical edition of his works in the first half of the 20th century. A further chapter is devoted to the Anglo-American perspective on Keller and the final chapter reviews the most important works of scholarly criticism and new critical perspectives in Keller scholarship over the last quarter of this century.

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