Some sparkling surprises in a canonical kaleidoscope

As an academic discipline, German literature used to come in four packages of roughly equal weight: the Middle Ages, the 18th, the 19th and the 20th centuries. Together, they constituted an orderly group around the twin peaks of Mittelalter (c 1200) and Goethezeit (c 1800). Students were advised not to worry unduly about the gaping 500-year void between 1250 and 1750; the "early modern" age rarely featured on reading lists and occupied correspondingly few pages in critical manuals. The rewards lay elsewhere. The late 18th century brought a brief neoclassical revival that was deemed sufficient to cancel out those fallow years and became known as Germany's Golden Age of "Weimar Classicism". To deny Goethe the status of national poet was the nearest thing to claiming that the Earth was flat.

This latest example is the product of a radical rethinking of priorities. Admittedly, it is traditional in the way in which it privileges dates. The table of contents reveals about 250 short chapters, each located in a specific year. This was done to facilitate what Walter Benjamin described as a "tiger's leap into the past", in which the singularity of a literary event is decisive while what is typical is left to one side. The consequence is the fracturing of the received canon into a kaleidoscope of magical moments, so that even Goethe is here permitted to take centre stage only in three brief episodes. He is evoked as the Storm-and-Stress author of Werther and as the doyen of letters at the point at which he completes his life's work in 1831. Framed between these epiphanies is a reminder of the master at his most informal and hidebound, pictured in a nail-biting exercise to chop the meat out of his ribald Roman Elegies before anyone else does. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the "father of modern German drama", fares little better when he is shown falsifying the date of his revolutionary comedy, Minna von Barnhelm .

Surprises are inevitable when it comes to who and what is included and excluded. Printers and historians, philosophers and film-makers, painters and sculptors are equally welcome. While the importance of Nuremberg, that "most German" of German cities, is emphasised, and Alexander von Humboldt gets a deserved look-in, the effects of the Scandinavian climate on Samuel Pufendorf have been regularly circumnavigated by mainstream literary scholarship until now. At their best, such pockets of information can be illuminating and thought-provoking. When Eric Rentschler traces the effects of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will on US popular culture, one senses just how easily this could generate an entire semester's worth of seminar topics. At the other extreme, we might question why 1437 should mark the "Beginning of modern thinking" or 19 the "Limits of historicism". Why does rigid Freiherr von Knigge deserve a chapter to himself when the radical Max Stirner is not mentioned? Why are Biedermeier stalwarts Carl Spitzweg and Wilhelm Busch given more exposure than progressive modernists such as Adolph Menzel and Oskar Kokoschka?

Space is limited even when 1,000 pages have been set aside for the purpose. Traditionalist eyebrows will rise at the discovery that several veritable pillars of the Pantheon (Friedrich Hebbel, Gerhart Hauptmann) have been bypassed in favour of Owlglass, Hans Staden and the Berlin Love Parade.

It is refreshing to see Fischart and the Yiddish Renaissance do their bit in neglected areas of the 16th century. Yet constant emphasis on dates, besides demonstrating even-handedness, can become irritating. August 26, 1882, may have been the day on which Friedrich Nietzsche announced "his achievement of newfound health" to the world - yet some might say that January 3, 1889, the day of his final collapse, marked a more significant milestone. There are minor inconsistencies in titles and place names - who will recognise that Ofen is actually Buda(pest)? - but as an editorial achievement, this volume sets uniformly high and innovative standards.

Histories of literature have evolved in ways that yesterday's specialists could not have predicted. Since Strasbourg-based Germanist John George Robertson offered us the original Cook's Tour in 1904, the presses of Oxford and Cambridge universities have vied with one another in the production of "Companions to German Literature", often organised alphabetically with entries on everything from Aachen to Das zwölfjährige Mönchlein . Neither Aachen nor the boy monk can claim iconic status as a landmark in the specifically literary landscape of the nation, yet these volumes allow the user to locate information at the turn of a page.

A New History of German Literature does not facilitate access to raw data and would be unsuitable for readers who need extensive or systematic coverage of specifics. For them, there is now no lack of CDs and websites.

This was recognised by the editor of the recent Cambridge History of German Literature , Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly, who set out to review the periods not as closed centuries but as intellectual biospheres, much as their own citizens did, using playbills and bestseller lists to identify the shows people were watching and to determine which books they were buying. The present editors have gone several extra miles to produce a sweeping overview of their massive subject without prioritising the positivistic perspective that former generations imposed on their readers.

Osman Durrani is professor of German, University of Kent at Canterbury.