FOR THIS EDITORIAL team, volume 30 represents our valedictory effort. Over the past year, some of us were able to transition from the Zoom squares to in-person conferences; we tentatively removed our masks, applauded with real hands, and continued debates in the corridors outside conference rooms. Nevertheless, we have come to value even more the continued opportunity to share work in this venue, and we as editors have particularly enjoyed bringing current debates, controversies, and new directions of ongoing, exciting research to these pages.

Hans Hahn's “Wielands Singspiel Alceste, ein Stein des Anstoßes für Goethe?” opens this issue with an exploration of the role Wieland's libretto, in particular, played in a literary dispute with Goethe. A certain synergy emerged in a cluster of contributions around issues of gender, influence, and female marginalization among Carl Niekerk's “Lotte's Bird, Female Desire, and the Language of ‘Sexuality’ in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers,” Maryann Piel's “La Roche and Goethe: Gender, Genre, and Authorship,” and an editorial by Margaretmary Daley in which she challenges us to confront gender bias. While Niekerk dwells on the scene of the canary's kiss as a moment in the history of sexuality at the edge of its biological and cultural construction, Piel latently picks up on Daley's challenge, restoring La Roche's constitutive role in Goethe's oeuvre (rather than the other way round, as much scholarship has it). Departing from scholarly analyses to the genre of editorial, Daley seeks to challenge women writers’ continued relegation to the margins of an eighteenth-century literary canon that she sees revolving around Goethe and/or other “great men”; in picking bias as a Schlagwort, Daley also begins to reflect on the state of the humanities more broadly, oscillating between the seemingly privileged position of choosing one's own research topics and the festering of structural inflexibilities that are contributing to the crisis of the humanities.

The next essay in the line-up, “Things of Art and Amor: Mediation in Goethe's Römische Elegien,” by Sebastian Meixner and Carolin Rocks, offers an innovative and compelling reading of the figure of Amor as poetic guide, matchmaker, rogue, servant, and mediator to Goethe's own Roman past.