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This is Camden House’s general German studies series, in which numerous titles have appeared since the early 1980s. It welcomes a broad range of topics and approaches - from traditional, narrowly literary studies on one hand to forays into cultural studies and cultural history on the other, from approaches based on traditional close reading to those emphasizing theory, from feminist to postmodern to multicultural. All periods of German culture and literature are fair game, from medieval Spielmannsepen to currently emerging writers of the twenty-first century.

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253 results in Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture

Page 9 of 13

Religion in Contemporary German Drama
  • Botho Strauß, George Tabori, Werner Fritsch, and Lukas Bärfuss
  • Sinéad Crowe
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    15 March 2013
  • Critics often claim that the twenty-first century has seen a sudden "return" of religion to the German stage. But although drama scholarship has largely focused on politics, postmodernity, gender, ethnicity, and "postdramatic" performance, religious themes, forms, and motifs have been a topic and a source of inspiration for German dramatists for several decades, as this study shows. Focusing on works by four major dramatists - Botho Strauß, George Tabori, Werner Fritsch, and Lukas Bärfuss - this book examines how, why, and to what effect religion is invoked in German drama since the late 1970s. It asks whether contemporary German drama succeeds in developing religious insights or is at most quasi-religious, exploiting religious signs for aesthetic, theatrical, or dramaturgical ends. It considers the performative and historical intersections between drama and religion, contextualizing the playwrights' treatments of religion by exploring how they lean on or repudiate the traditions of modern European drama, especially that of Strindberg, the Expressionists, Artaud, Grotowski, and Beckett. It also draws on the sociology, anthropology, and psychology of religion, exploring how these works reflect the changing place of religion and spirituality in the world, from secularization to the "alternative" modes of religiosity that have proliferated in Western society since the 1960s. Sinéad Crowe is a Teaching Assistant at the University of Limerick, Ireland.

Violent Women in Print
  • Representations in the West German Print Media of the 1960s and 1970s
  • Clare Bielby
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 April 2013
    Print publication:
    29 November 2012
  • As the controversy surrounding the release of Uli Edel and Bernd Eichinger's 2008 feature film ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ demonstrates, West Germany's terrorist period, which reached its height in the ‘German autumn’ of 1977, is still a fascinating - and troubling - subject. One of the most provocative aspects, still today, is the high proportion of women involved in terrorism, most notoriously Ulrike Meinhof. That the film concentrates on the trajectory of Meinhof's life and mobilizes established and hence reassuring paradigms of femininity in its representation of her (as ‘mother’ and ‘hysterical woman’) suggests that the combination of women and violence is still threatening and that there is still mileage to be had from feminizing the discourse. The present study returns to the West German print media of the 1960s and 1970s and raises questions about the continuing preoccupation with this period. Looking at publications from the right-wing ‘Bild’ to the liberal ‘Der Spiegel’, it explores how violent women - not only terrorists but also others such as the convicted murderer and media femme fatale Vera Brühne - were represented in text and image. This is the first book to explore print-media representations of German terrorism from an explicitly gendered perspective, and one of very few books in English to address the period in Germany at all, despite steadily increasing interest in the UK and the US. Clare Bielby is Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Hull.

German and European Poetics after the Holocaust
  • Crisis and Creativity
  • Edited by Gert Hofmann, Rachel MagShamhráin, Marko Pajevic, Michael Shields
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    20 May 2011
  • Crisis presents chances for change and creativity: Adorno's famous dictum that writing poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric has haunted discourse on poetics, but has also given rise to poetic and theoretical acts of resistance. The essays in this volume discuss postwar poetics in terms of new poetological directions and territory rather than merely destruction of traditions. Embedded in the discourse triggered by Adorno, the volume's foci include the work of Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn, and Ingeborg Bachmann. Other German writers discussed are Ilse Aichinger, Rose Ausländer, Charlotte Beradt, Thomas Kling, Heiner Müller, and Nelly Sachs; concrete poetry is also treated. The final section offers comparative views of the poetics of European literary figures such as Jean Paul Sartre, André Malraux, and Danilo Kis and a consideration of the aesthetics of Claude Lanzmann's film 'Shoah.' Contributors: Chris Bezzel, Manuel Bragança, Gisela Dischner, Rüdiger Görner, Stefan Hajduk, Gert Hofmann, Aniela Knoblich, Rachel MagShamhráin, Marton Marko, Elaine Martin, Barry Murnane, Marko Pajevic, Tatjana Petzer, Renata Plaice, Annette Runte, Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa, Michael Shields, Peter Tame. Gert Hofmann is a Lecturer in German, Comparative Literature, Drama, and Film and Rachel MagShamhráin is a Lecturer in German, Film, and Comparative Literature, both at University College Cork; Marko Pajevic is a Lecturer in German at Queen's University Belfast; Michael Shields is a Lecturer in German at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Overturning 'Dr. Faustus'
  • Rereading Thomas Mann's Novel in Light of 'Observations of a Non-Political Man'
  • Frances Lee
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    19 March 2007
  • Thomas Mann's last major novel, 'Doktor Faustus,' revolves around the transformation of traditional German culture into Hitler's fascist Germany, a process that intrigues and confounds thinking people still today. Mann has always been considered an exemplary and authoritative portrayer of German culture, and his opinion on the rise of fascism carries considerable weight. Unfortunately, the novel has always been interpreted as saying the opposite of what it does in fact say. Frances Lee provides a radically new interpretation by relating in a detailed manner to the text of Doktor Faustus the arguments expressed by Mann in his 'Observations of a Non-Political Man' - a book of political essays published in 1918. This approach resolves many of the features that have been seen by critics as flaws or contradictions in the novel. Lee establishes what is actually happening in the novel in its historical setting, showing Mann's view of how the acceptance of fascism occurred and the determining role he attributed to the academic community in bringing about the disaster. Her book will be of interest to both amateur and professional students of Mann, particularly because it points to rich new directions for study. Frances Ann Ray Lee received the Ph.D. in German literature from the University of Toronto in 2005.

Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic
  • Edited by Stuart Taberner, Karina Berger
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 February 2009
  • In recent years it has become much more accepted in Germany to consider aspects of the Second World War in which Germans were not perpetrators, but victims: the Allied bombing campaign, expulsions of 'ethnic' Germans, mass rapes of German women, and postwar internment and persecution. An explosion of literary fiction on these topics has accompanied this trend. Sebald's 'The Air War and Literature' and Grass's 'Crabwalk' are key texts, but there are many others; the great majority seek not to revise German responsibility for the Holocaust but to balance German victimhood and German perpetration. This book of essays is the first in English to examine closely the variety of these texts. An opening section on the 1950s - a decade of intense literary engagement with German victimhood before the focus shifted to German perpetration - provides context, drawing parallels but also noting differences between the immediate postwar period and today. The second section focuses on key texts written since the mid-1990s shifts in perspectives on the Nazi past, on perpetration and victimhood, on 'ordinary Germans,' and on the balance between historical empathy and condemnation. Contributors: Karina Berger, Elizabeth Boa, Stephen Brockmann, David Clarke, Mary Cosgrove, Rick Crownshaw, Helen Finch, Frank Finlay, Katharina Hall, Colette Lawson, Caroline Schaumann, Helmut Schmitz, Kathrin Schödel, and Stuart Taberner. Stuart Taberner is professor of contemporary German literature, culture, and society, and Karina Berger, B.A., M.St., is a Ph.D. candidate, both at the University of Leeds, UK.

Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film
  • Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732–1933
  • Erik Butler
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 March 2010
  • For the last three hundred years, fictions of the vampire have fed off anxieties about cultural continuity. Though commonly represented as a parasitic aggressor from without, the vampire is in fact a native of Europe, and its 'metamorphoses,' to quote Baudelaire, a distorted image of social transformation. Because the vampire grows strong whenever and wherever traditions weaken, its representations have multiplied with every political, economic, and technological revolution from the eighteenth century on. Today, in the age of globalization, vampire fictions are more virulent than ever, and the monster enjoys hunting grounds as vast as the international market. 'Metamorphoses of the Vampire' explains why representations of vampirism began in the eighteenth century, flourished in the nineteenth, and came to eclipse nearly all other forms of monstrosity in the early twentieth century. Many of the works by French and German authors discussed here have never been presented to students and scholars in the English-speaking world. While there are many excellent studies that examine Victorian vampires, the undead in cinema, contemporary vampire fictions, and the vampire in folklore, until now no work has attempted to account for the unifying logic that underlies the vampire's many and often apparently contradictory forms. Erik Butler holds a PhD from Yale University and has taught at Emory University and Swarthmore College. His publications include 'The Bellum Gramaticale and the Rise of European Literature' (2010) and a translation with commentary of 'Regrowth' ('Vidervuks') by the Soviet Jewish author Der Nister (2011).

Goethe's Concept of the Daemonic
  • After the Ancients
  • Angus Nicholls
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 May 2006
  • For Plato, the daemonic is a sensibility that brings individuals into contact with divine knowledge; Socrates was also inspired by a 'divine voice' known as his 'daimonion.' Goethe was introduced to this ancient concept by Hamann and Herder, who associated it with the aesthetic category of genius. This book shows how the young Goethe depicted the idea of daemonic genius in works of the Storm and Stress period, before exploring the daemonic in a series of later poetic and autobiographical works. Reading Goethe's works on the daemonic through theorists such as Lukács, Benjamin, Gadamer, Adorno, and Blumenberg, Nicholls contends that they contain arguments concerning reason, nature, and subjectivity that are central to both European Romanticism and the Enlightenment. ANGUS NICHOLLS is Claussen-Simon Foundation Research Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature at the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations in the Department of German, Queen Mary, University of London.

Writing the New Berlin
  • The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature
  • Katharina Gerstenberger
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 July 2008
  • The wall was still coming down when critics began to call for the great Berlin novel that could explain what was happening to Germany and the Germans. Such a novel never appeared. Instead, writers have created a patchwork imaginary - in the form of about 300 works of fiction set in Berlin - of a city and a nation whose identity collapsed virtually overnight. Contributors to this literary collage include established writers like Peter Schneider and Christa Wolf, young authors like Tanja Dückers and Ingo Schramm, German-Turkish authors Zafer Senocak and Yadé Kara, and the Austrians Kathrin Röggla and Marlene Streeruwitz. The non-arrival of the great Berlin novel marks the reorientation in German culture and literature that is the focus of this study: the experience of unification was too diverse, too postmodern, too influenced by global developments to be captured by one novel. Berlin literature of the postunification decade is marked by ambiguity: change is linked to questions of historical continuity; postmodern simulation finds its counterpart in a quest for authenticity; and the assimilation of Germanness into European and global contexts is both liberation and loss. This book pursues a nuanced understanding of the search for new ways to tell the story of Germany's past and of its importance for the formation of a new German identity. Katharina Gerstenberger is associate professor of German at the University of Cincinnati.

Enlightened War
  • German Theories and Cultures of Warfare from Frederick the Great to Clausewitz
  • Edited by Elisabeth Krimmer, Patricia Anne Simpson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 March 2011
  • 'Enlightened War' investigates the multiple and complex interactions between warfare and Enlightenment thought. Although the Enlightenment is traditionally identified with the ideals of progress, eternal peace, reason, and self-determination, Enlightenment discourse unfolded during a period of prolonged European warfare from the Seven Years' War to the Napoleonic conquest of Europe. The essays in this volume explore the palpable influence of war on eighteenth-century thought and argue for an ideological affinity among war, Enlightenment thought, and its legacy. The essays are interdisciplinary, engaging with history, art history, philosophy, military theory, gender studies, and literature and with historical events and cultural contexts from the early Enlightenment through German Classicism and Romanticism. The volume enriches our understanding of warfare in the eighteenth century and shows how theories and practices of war impacted concepts of subjectivity, national identity, gender, and art. It also sheds light on the contemporary discussion of the legitimacy of violence by juxtaposing theories of war, concepts of revolution, and human rights discourses. Contributors: Johannes Birgfeld, David Colclasure, Sara Eigen Figal, Ute Frevert, Wolf Kittler, Elisabeth Krimmer, Waltraud Maierhofer, Arndt Niebisch, Felix Saure, Galili Shahar, Patricia Anne Simpson, Inge Stephan. Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California, Davis, and Patricia Anne Simpson is Associate Professor of German Studies at Montana State University.

Heights of Reflection
  • Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century
  • Edited by Sean Ireton, Caroline Schaumann
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 June 2012
  • Mountains have always stirred the human imagination, playing a crucial role in the cultural evolution of peoples around the globe and becoming infused with meaning in the process. Beyond their geographical-geological significance, mountains affect the topography of the mind, whether as objects of peril or attraction, of spiritual enlightenment or existential fulfilment, of philosophical contemplation or aesthetic inspiration. This volume challenges the oversimplified assumption that human interaction with mountains is a distinctly modern development, one that began with the empowerment of the individual in the wake of Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic subjectivity. These essays by European and North American scholars examine the lure of mountains in German literature, philosophy, film, music, and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, with a focus on the interaction between humans and the alpine environment. The contributors consider mountains not as mere symbolic tropes or literary metaphors, but as constituting a tangible reality that informs the experiences and ideas of writers, naturalists, philosophers, filmmakers, and composers. Overall, this volume seeks to provide multiple answers to questions regarding the cultural significance of mountains as well as the physical practice of climbing them. Contributors: Peter Arnds, Olaf Berwald, Albrecht Classen, Roger Cook, Scott Denham, Sean Franzel, Christof Hamann, Harald Höbusch, Dan Hooley, Peter Höyng, Sean Ireton, Oliver Lubrich, Anthony Ozturk, Caroline Schaumann, Heather I. Sullivan, Johannes Türk, Sabine Wilke, Wilfried Wilms. Sean Ireton is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri. Caroline Schaumann is Associate Professor of German Studies at Emory University.

Popular Revenants
  • The German Gothic and its International Reception, 1800–2000
  • Edited by Andrew Cusack, Barry Murnane
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    25 June 2012
  • The literary mode of the Gothic is well established in English Studies, and there is growing interest in its internationality. Gothic fiction is seen as transgressive, especially in the way it crosses borders, often illicitly - for instance, in the form of plagiarized texts or pseudo-translations of nonexistent sources. In the 1790s, when the English Gothic novel was emerging, the real or ostensible source of many of these uncanny texts was Germany. This first book in English dedicated to the German Gothic in over thirty years is aimed at students and researchers in German Studies and English Studies, and redresses deficiencies in existing sources, which are outdated, piecemeal, or not sufficiently grounded in German Studies. The book examines the international reception of German Gothic since the 1790s heyday of the Gothic novel in Britain and Germany; traces a line of Gothic writing in German to the present day; and inquires into the extraliterary impact of German Gothic. Thus the essays do full justice to the Gothic as a site of conflict and exchange - both between cultures and between discourses. Contributors: Peter Arnds, Silke Arnold-de Simine, Jürgen Barkhoff, Matthias Bickenbach, Andrew Cusack, Mario Grizelj, Jörg Kreienbrock, Barry Murnane, Victor Sage, Monika Schmitz-Emans, Catherine Smale, Andrew Webber. Andrew Cusack is Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Institut für Kulturwissenschaft of the Humboldt-Universität Berlin. Barry Murnane is Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany.

A Study of the Major Novellas of E.T.A. Hoffmann
  • Birgit Röder
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    03 February 2003
  • Analysis of the novellas of the German Romantic writer and composer, focusing on the issues of art and the artist. The German Romantic writer and composer E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) - perhaps best known to the English-speaking world through his 'Nutcracker' and through Jacques Offenbach's opera 'Tales of Hoffmann' - struggled to convince his predominantly bourgeois public of the merits of art and literature. Not surprisingly, many of his most important novellas are bound up with the dilemmas of art and the challenges faced by the Romantic artist, and it is these 'Künstlernovellen' that are the focus of this study. Birgit Röderargues that Hoffmann's artists are not simply individuals who create works of art, but rather figures through whom the author explores the predicament of those who reject the conventional world of bourgeois reality and seek to assert the claims of the imagination in a world dominated by prosaic rationalism. Contrary to previous scholars however, Röder demonstrates that Hoffmann's novellas clearly warn against a view of art as an autonomous aesthetic realm cut off from the world of reality. This is particularly apparent in Röder's analysis of gender relations in Hoffmann's oeuvre - especially the relationship between (male) artist and (female) muse - which underlines the extent to which art, literature, and the imagination are inseparably bound up with the prevailing social reality. The novellas that are given extensive consideration are 'Das Fräulein von Scuderi, Der Sandmann, Die Jesuiterkirche in G., Die Fermate, Der Artushof, Don Juan, Das Sanctus,' and 'Rat Krespel'. Birgit Röder teaches German language and literature at the University of Reading, UK.

Arno Schmidt's 'Zettel's Traum'
  • An Analysis
  • Volker Max Langbehn
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    15 October 2003
  • Arno Schmidt (1914-1979) is considered one of the most daring and influential writers of postwar Germany; the Germanist Jeremy Adler has called him a 'giant of postwar German literature.' Schmidt was awarded the Fontane Prize in 1964 and the Goethe Prize in 1973, and his early fiction has been translated into English to high critical acclaim, but he is not a well-known figure in the English-speaking world, where his complex work remains at the margins of critical inquiry. Volker Langbehn's book introduces Schmidt to the English-speaking audience, with primary emphasis on his most famous novel, 'Zettel's Traum'. One reviewer called the book an 'elephantine monster' because of its unconventional size (folio format), length (1334 pages and over 10 million characters), and unique presentation of text in the form of notes, typewritten pages, parallel columns, and collages. The novel narrates the life of the main characters, Daniel Pagenstecher, Paul Jacobi and his wife Wilma, and their teenage daughter Franziska. In discussing the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe, the four engage in the problems connected with a translation of Poe. Langbehn's study investigates how literary language can mediate or account for the world of experiences and for concepts. Schmidt's use of unconventional presentation formats challenges us to analyze how we think about reading and writing literary texts. Instead of viewing such texts as a representation of reality, Schmidt's novel destabilizes this unquestioned mode of representation, posing a radical challenge to what contemporary literary criticism defines as literature. No comprehensive study of 'Zettel's Traum' exists in English. Volker Langbehn is associate professor of German at San Francisco State University.

Elias Canetti's Counter-Image of Society
  • Crowds, Power, Transformation
  • Johann P. Arnason, David Roberts
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    23 February 2004
  • The award of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981 has seemingly assured Elias Canetti's place in literary history. But his significance as a cultural critic has not been adequately recognized. The present study redresses this situation in two ways: by mapping the counter-image of human existence, history, and society that informs Canetti's critique of the modern world and its sciences; and by opening up Canetti's hermetic oeuvre by tracing his cryptic and often concealed dialogue with major figures within the Western tradition such as Hobbes, Durkheim, and Freud and contemporaries such as Adorno, Arendt, and Elias. The authors ask how Canetti's alternative vision of man and society relates to important themes of twentieth-century social and civilizational thought even as it calls into question fundamental assumptions of the social and human sciences. In analyses of 'Auto da Fé, Crowds and Power,' and the aphorisms, the authors elucidate key aspects of Canetti's interrogation of human existence and human history across five thematic complexes: individual and social psychology, totalitarian politics, religion and politics, theories of society, and power and culture. They thus trace the movement of Canetti's thought from an apocalyptic sense of crisis to his search for cultural resources to set against the holocaust of European civilization. Johann P. Arnason teaches sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne and David Roberts is Emeritus Professor of German at Monash University, Melbourne.

Love and Death in Goethe
  • 'One and Double'
  • Ellis Dye
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    22 October 2004
  • Goethe, in association with his younger Romantic compatriots the Schlegels, Novalis, Fichte, and Schelling, struggled with the subject-object dichotomy, and tried to bridge the gap between self and other, consciousness and nature. His theory and practice prefigured the Romantics' determination to display and interrogate the linguistic and cultural structures informing their own thinking and modes of representation-what Goethe calls one's 'Vorstellungsart.' His work exploits, subverts, and supplants inherited conventions and signs, demonstrating with virtuosic irony that literature is a system of texts, pre-texts, and pre-established but dynamic conceptual models. ' Love and Death in Goethe:'One and Double' ' explores Goethe's use, in a wide range of his poetry and prose, of the theme of 'Liebestod' (love and death) and related embodiments of the paradox of unity in duality. Ellis Dye also examines Goethe's use of other themes related to love and death-the 'femme fatale,' the 'vagina dentata, Frau Welt,' the Lorelei, venereal disease, the 'Lustmord'-and considers issues of selfhood and individuation as well as the possibility that the love-death theme contains an implicit gender bias toward the existential fact of personal separateness. Poems, plays, and novels are dealt with, nevertheless, as works of art, not only as illustrations of an idea or as points of intersection in a system of rhetorical conventions, and are examined for intellectual cohesiveness, elegance, and integrity of design as well as special meanings and effects. ' Love and Death in Goethe:'One and Double' ' explores the meaning of the central theme of Romantic poetry in the works of the most important Romantic poet of all. Students of literary culture, both the lay reader and the Goethe specialist, will be enlightened by its approach and find pleasure and instruction in its revelations. Robert Ellis Dye is professor of German at Macalester College.

Interwar Vienna
  • Culture between Tradition and Modernity
  • Edited by Deborah Holmes, Lisa Silverman
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 October 2009
  • Although beset by social, political, and economic instabilities, interwar Vienna was an exhilarating place, with pioneering developments in the arts and innovations in the social sphere. Research on the period long saw the city as a mere shadow of its former imperial self; more recently it has concentrated on high-profile individual figures or party politics. This volume of new essays widens the view, stretching disciplinary boundaries to consider the cultural and social movements that shaped the city. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resulted not in an abandonment of the arts, but rather led to new forms of expression that were nevertheless conditioned by the legacies of earlier periods. The city's culture was caught between extremes, from neopositivism to cultural pessimism, Catholic mysticism to Austro-Marxism, late Enlightenment liberalism to rabid antisemitism. Concentrating on the paradoxes and often productive tensions that these created, the volume's twelve essays explore achievements and anxieties in fields ranging from modern dance, theater, music, film, and literature to economic, cultural, and racial policy. The volume will appeal to social, cultural, and political historians as well as to specialists in modern European literary and visual culture. Contributors: Andrea Amort, Andrew Barker, Alys X. George, Deborah Holmes, Jon Hughes, Birgit Lang, Wolfgang Maderthaner, Therese Muxeneder, Birgit Peter, Lisa Silverman, Edward Timms, Robert Vilain, John Warren, Paul Weindling. Deborah Holmes is Researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography in Vienna. Lisa Silverman is Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Literary Studies and the Pursuits of Reading
  • Edited by Eric Downing, Jonathan M. Hess, Richard V. Benson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    17 September 2012
  • Thirty years ago, when theory emerged as integral to literary studies, investigations into the nature of reading dominated academic criticism. Since then, as cultural studies and historical approaches have gained ascendancy, critical focus on reading has waned. This collection of new essays by leading scholars of German and comparative literature, inspired by the work of the long-time and influential scholar of reading Clayton Koelb, puts the study of reading back at center stage, considering current theory on reading, emotion, and affect alongside historical investigations into cultural practices of reading as they have changed over time. Topics addressed include ancient practices of magic reading; Christian conversionary reading; the emergence of silent reading in the Middle Ages; Renaissance ekphrastic reading; homeopathy, reading and Romanticism; and German-Jewish reading cultures in the nineteenth century. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of literary criticism, German Studies, comparative literature, and European history. Contributors: Richard V. Benson, Stanley Corngold, Eric Downing, Darryl Gless, Ruth V. Gross, Jonathan Hess, Janice Hewlett Koelb, Alice Kuzniar, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Gary Shapiro, Kathryn Starkey, Christopher Wild. Eric Downing is Hanes Distinguished Term Professor of German, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Jonathan M. Hess is Professor of German and Moses M. and Hannah L. Malkin Distinguished Term Professor of Jewish History and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Richard V. Benson is Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Valparaiso University.

Heinrich von Kleist's Poetics of Passivity
  • Steven R. Huff
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 October 2009
  • Controversial during his lifetime as well as among today's scholars and critics, the German dramatist and writer of novellas Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) remains an enigma. Was he a Romantic or a Classic? A conservative or a liberal? What is his status in the literary canon? Because of their enigmatic qualities, Kleist's writings have attracted the attention of critics and theorists from well beyond the narrow confines of German literary studies: comparatists, historians, philosophers, legal scholars, and even musicologists and dance historians. And outside academia his writings are as popular as ever. This book scrutinizes for the first time a key element in Kleist's thought and poetic process: his obsession with the problem of passivity. Scholars have long been attracted to the dynamic, larger-than-life characters in Kleist's fiction and drama, overlooking the fact that Kleist's works often turn on moments of stasis, as these same protagonists are suddenly and sometimes brutally rendered passive. Through a careful, historically grounded, and original investigation incorporating extensive primary research in late-Enlightenment natural philosophy and eighteenth-century medical practices, the study sheds light on these nodal points in Kleist's work, contending that these structures of passivity are so pervasive and so systematic in his work that they can justifiably and profitably be viewed as constituting a kind of poetics. Steven R. Huff is associate professor in the Department of German at Oberlin College.

Bertolt Brecht's 'Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches'
  • A German Exile Drama in the Struggle against Fascism
  • John J. White, Ann White
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    30 June 2010
  • Brecht's 'Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches' (Fear and Misery of the Third Reich) gives a compelling documentary picture of life in Nazi Germany. Close readings of individual scenes are accompanied by a detailed analysis of their role within the play's overall structure. Contrary to the assumption that it is a work of Aristotelian realism, Brecht is shown to employ covert alienation devices that are an integral part of his literary campaign against Third Reich Germany. This first study in English on the subject of Brecht and fascism offers a corrective to the overconcentration on the play's artistic aspects. It considers Brecht's relationship to the Popular Front's campaign against the National Socialist regime. Attention is paid to the play's genesis, and, in the case of 'The Private Life of the Master Race,' to the partial shift from the Third Reich of 1933-38 to the war period predicted in the original 'Furcht und Elend' cycle. The play's central theme of resistance, its propaganda value, and its political and artistic reception are addressed within their historical and ideological framework. The result is a challenging assessment of the play's strengths and limitations as a response to German totalitarianism. John J. White is Emeritus Professor of German and Comparative Literature at King's College London, and Ann White is Senior Lecturer in German at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Joseph Roth's March into History
  • From the Early Novels to 'Radetzkymarsch' and 'Die Kapuzinergruft'
  • Kati Tonkin
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 October 2008
  • Joseph Roth was one of the most significant German-language writers of the interwar period, yet few major studies of his work have been published in English. Kati Tonkin's monograph spans Roth's novelistic career, challenging the widely held assumption that his writing can be divided into an early 'socialist' and a later 'monarchist' phase: that his late novels 'Radetzkymarsch' and 'Die Kapuzinergruft' are deeply nostalgic, presenting an idealized picture of the Habsburg Empire, a 'backward-turned utopia.' In contrast, Tonkin reads the later works not as escapist but as attempts to grasp the reasons for the failure of the empire. The historical context in which Roth operated - that of the late empire and its successor states - has been a focus of renewed interest since the end of the Cold War, as Central Europe re-emerges as a region with a distinct historical and cultural identity steeped in multinational Habsburg traditions, and Central European nations accede to the European Union. This book will therefore be of interest to students and scholars of early-20th-century Central European literature, history, and culture; of the socio-cultural environment of the late Habsburg Empire; of Jewish identity in German-speaking Central Europe; and of national identity in the multinational context. Kati Tonkin is Lecturer in German and European Studies at the University of Western Australia.

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