Complex Pleasure deals with questions of literary feeling in eight major German writers―Lessing, Kant, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Musil, Kafka, Trakl, and Benjamin. On the basis of close readings of these authors Stanley Corngold makes vivid the following that where there is literature there is complex pleasure; that this pleasure is complex because it involves the impression of a disclosure; that this thought is foremost in the minds of a number of canonical writers; that important literary works in the German tradition―fiction, poetry, critique―can be illuminated through their treatment of literary feeling; and, finally, that the conceptual terms for these forms of feeling continually vary.