This book is an echo of the Faust renaissance currently sweeping through Germany. The past decade has seen a surge of studies, press coverage, theatre productions (most notably the twenty-three-hour uncut version by Peter Stein), and public discussions. In the summer of 2000, while Stein's production was in full swing, I took part in such discussions of Faust and found that the participants were mostly exploring their own contemporary experience. To me, as a literary man, such a collective excitement about a full and faithful performance of the classical work was exhilarating. It was an excitement which decades of directorial experiments had failed to provoke.

One of the consequences of these discussions was the Faust Festival in Toronto, a week-long extravaganza of lectures, theatre workshops, performances, concerts and exhibitions from which this book emerged. It contains the latest interpretive insights by leading Faust scholars, as well as younger authors with new and productive ideas. Most of them had presented papers at the symposium which were then thoroughly revised and expanded for publication. Albrecht Schöne, Eberhard Lämmert, Jane Brown and Dieter Borchmeyer were brought on board, and a wide-ranging interview with Peter Stein was conducted, translated and edited for the volume.

The need for a book that presents the latest significant Faust research to the English-speaking world is obvious enough.