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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 13 of 13

Marriage, Gender, and Desire in Early Enlightenment German Comedy
  • Edward T. Potter
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 March 2012
  • J. C. Gottsched, who reformed early Enlightenment German theater, claimed for comedy the ability to transform morality. The new literary comedies of the 1740s, among the other moral goals that they pursued, propagated a new sentimental discourse promoting marriage based on love while devaluing its traditional socioeconomic foundations. Yet in comedies by well-known dramatists of the period such as Gottsched, Gellert, J. E. Schlegel, Lessing, and Quistorp, alternative gender roles and sexual behaviors call the primacy of marriage into question: there are women who refuse to be integrated into marriage, episodes of cross-dressing that foreground the culturally constructed aspects of gender roles, instances of male same-sex desire, and allusions to female same-sex desire. Edward T. Potter examines this marital discourse in close readings of these authors' plays, uncovering the ambiguity of eighteenth-century comedy's stance on marriage and highlighting its resistance to the emerging discourse of the sentimental marriage. In addition to excavating the connections between the texts and norms regarding gender roles and sexual behavior, Potter also examines how these comedies self-reflexively perform their own reception in plays-within-plays that reflect upon early Enlightenment comedy, poetics, and pedagogical aesthetics and thereby comment on the efficacy of theater as a means of propagating such norms. Edward T. Potter is Associate Professor of German at Mississippi State University.

The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil's 'The Man without Qualities'
  • Possibility as Reality
  • Genese Grill
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 December 2012
  • Robert Musil, known to be a scientific and philosophical thinker, was committed to aesthetics as a process of experimental creation of an ever-shifting reality. Musil wanted, above all, to be a creative writer, and obsessively engaged in almost endless deferral via variations and metaphoric possibilities in his novel project, 'The Man without Qualities.' This lifelong process of writing is embodied in the unfinished novel by a recurring metaphor of self-generating de-centered circle worlds. The present study analyzes this structure with reference to Musil's concepts of the utopia of the Other Condition, Living and Dead Words, Specific and Non-Specific Emotions, Word Magic, and the Still Life. In contrast to most recent studies of Musil, it concludes that the extratemporal metaphoric experience of the Other Condition does not fail, but rather constitutes the formal and ethical core of Musil's novel. The first study to utilize the newly published Klagenfurt Edition of Musil's literary remains (a searchable annotated text), 'The World as Metaphor' offers a close reading of variations and text genesis, shedding light not only on Musil's novel, but also on larger questions about the modernist artist's role and responsibility in consciously re-creating the world. Genese Grill holds a PhD in Germanic Literatures and Languages from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York.

Heinrich von Kleist and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • Violence, Identity, Nation
  • Steven Howe
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 December 2012
  • Heinrich von Kleist is renowned as an author who posed a radical challenge to the orthodoxies of his age. Today, his works are frequently seen to relentlessly deconstruct the paradigms of Idealism and to reflect a Romantic, even postmodern, perspective on the ambiguities of the world. Such a view fails, however, to do full justice to the more complex manner in which Kleist articulates the tensions between the securities of Enlightenment thought and the anxieties of the revolutionary age. Steven Howe offers a new angle on Kleist's dialogue with the Enlightenment by reconsidering his investment in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Where previous critics have trivialized this as intense but fleeting and born of personal identification, Howe here establishes Rousseau's importance as a lasting source of inspiration for the violent constellations of Kleist's fiction. Taking account of both Rousseau's critique of modernity and his later propositions for working toward the Enlightenment promise of emancipation, the book locates a mode of discourse which, placed in the historical context of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, sheds new light on the political and ethical issues at play in Kleist's work. Steven Howe is Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. He is co-editor, with Ricarda Schmidt and Seán Allan, of 'Heinrich von Kleist: Konstruktive und Destruktive Funktionen von Gewalt' (forthcoming, 2012).

Schiller's Literary Prose Works
  • New Translations and Critical Essays
  • Edited by Jeffrey L. High
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 November 2008
  • Friedrich Schiller was a dramatist and poet for the ages, an important aesthetic theorist, and among Germany's first historians. But he left few works of literary prose behind - seven short tales and fragments, almost all from early in his career - and although they include some of his most resonant in his own time, they are largely overlooked today. Several of the pieces - which include The Ghost-Seer, A Magnanimous Act from Most Recent History, The Criminal of Lost Honor: A True Story, A Curious Example of Female Vengeance, Duke Alba at Breakfast at Castle Rudolstadt, Play of Fate: A Fragment of a True Story, and Haoh-Kiöh-Tschuen - have never before appeared in English translation. But they are a seminal link in the evolution of the then-nascent German novella. They exhibit the anthropological curiosity and moral confusion that made Schiller's first drama, The Robbers, a sensation, demonstrating an original artistry that justifies consideration of scholars and students today, on the eve of the 250th anniversary of his birth. New translations of the seven works appear here together with introductory critical essays. Contributors: Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, Otto W. Johnston, Gail K. Hart, Dennis F. Mahoney; Translators: Francis Lamport, Ian Codding, Jeffrey L. High, Ellis Dye, Edward T. Larkin, Carrie Ann Collenberg. Jeffrey L. High is associate professor at California State University Long Beach.

Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s
  • Edited by David Robb, David G. Robb
  • With contributions by Annette Bluhdorn , Eckhard Holler and Peter Thompson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 September 2007
  • The modern German political song is a hybrid of high and low culture. With its roots in the birth of mass culture in the 1920s, it employs communicative strategies of popular song. Yet its tendencies toward philosophical, poetic, and musical sophistication reveal intellectual aspirations. This volume looks at the influence of revolutionary artistic traditions in the lyrics and music of the 'Liedermacher' of east and west Germany: the rediscovery of the revolutionary songs of 1848 by the 1960s West German folk revival, the use of the profane 'carnivalesque' street-ballad tradition by Wolf Biermann and the GDR duo Wenzel & Mensching, the influence of 1920s artistic experimentation on 'Liedermacher' such as Konstantin Wecker, and the legacy of Hanns Eisler's revolutionary song theory. The book also provides an insider perspective on the countercultural scenes of the two Germanys, examining the conditions in which political songs were written and performed. In view of the decline of the political song form since the fall of communism, the book ends with a look at German avant-garde techno's attempt to create a music that challenges conventional cultural perceptions and attitudes. CONTRIBUTORS: DAVID ROBB, ECKARD HOLLER, ANNETTE BLüHDORN, PETER THOMPSON. David Robb is Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the Queen's University of Belfast.

German Memory Contests
  • The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990
  • Edited by Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, Georg Grote
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 September 2006
  • Since unification in 1990, Germany has seen a boom in the confrontation with memory, evident in a sharp increase in novels, films, autobiographies, and other forms of public discourse that engage with the long-term effects of National Socialism across generations. Taking issue with the concept of 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung,' or coming to terms with the Nazi past, which after 1945 guided nearly all debate on the topic, the contributors to this volume view contemporary German culture through the more dynamic concept of 'memory contests,' which sees all forms of memory, public or private, as ongoing processes of negotiating identity in the present. Touching on gender, generations, memory and postmemory, trauma theory, ethnicity, historiography, and family narrative, the contributions offer a comprehensive picture of current German memory debates, in so doing shedding light on the struggle to construct a German identity mindful of but not wholly defined by the horrors of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Contributors: Peter Fritzsche, Anne Fuchs, Elizabeth Boa, Stefan Willer, Chloe E. M. Paver, Matthias Fiedler, J. J. Long, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Cathy S. Gelbin, Jennifer E. Michaels, Mary Cosgrove, Andrew Plowman, Roger Woods. Anne Fuchs is professor of modern German literature and Georg Grote is lecturer in German history, both at University College Dublin. Mary Cosgrove is lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh. Winner of the 2007 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award.

In the Shadow of Empire
  • Austrian Experiences of Modernity in the Writings of Musil, Roth, and Bachmann
  • Malcolm Spencer
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 September 2008
  • Austria was not the only European country whose old order disintegrated in the early twentieth century, giving way to the crisis of modernity, nor the only country whose literature bears the marks of this crisis. But modernity's onset was experienced differently in Austria: in the words of Karl Kraus, it served as 'laboratory for the fall of world civilization.' This book examines the crisis as reflected in fiction written by Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, and Ingeborg Bachmann between 1920 and 1970. After examining the elusive concept of modernity, Malcolm Spencer looks at the responses of the three authors to the central themes of modernity: fragmentation, nationalism, the end of empire, and ambivalence. Chapters on Musil examine his understanding of the 'ancien régime' in Austria and his analysis of the ideological stage of modernity. Spencer then considers Roth's more negative reaction, showing the post-imperial novel 'Radetzkymarsch' to be a nostalgic response to the collapse of Habsburg Austria and the rise of fascism. The final chapter looks again at the end of empire, not in the work of writers who lived through it, but through that of one who experienced it as a historical and cultural legacy: Ingeborg Bachmann. Malcolm Spencer is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham.

Hölderlin after the Catastrophe
  • Heidegger - Adorno - Brecht
  • Robert Savage
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 September 2008
  • Toward the end of the Second World War, the works of the great German poet Friedrich Hölderlin were heavily exploited by Nazi propaganda as a source of spiritual strength for the war-weary German people. Once the fires had burned out, scholars attempted to absolve Hölderlin of any responsibility for his wartime (mis)appropriation. Only a few saw that his work would have to be reread in the light of the iniquities that had been said and done in his name. This book examines how Hölderlin was taken up by three such thinkers, among the most influential and controversial of their time: Martin Heidegger, Theodor W. Adorno, and Bertolt Brecht. It extrapolates from their writings on the poet three irreconcilable paradigms of reception - conversation, polemic, and citation - that are of significance for the broader project of working through the tarnished German cultural legacy after 1945. In each case, Hölderlin is examined as the occasion for salvaging that legacy after, from, and in view of the catastrophe. This first full-length study of Hölderlin's postwar reception will be of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of German literature, European philosophy, the politics of cultural memory, and critical theory. Robert Savage is ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Women in the Works of Lou Andreas-Salomé
  • Negotiating Identity
  • Muriel Cormican
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 December 2009
  • The writer and intellectual Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) fascinates scholars of German literature because of her associations with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud and because she was active in the cultural and intellectual vanguard of late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and Austria. Recent editions of her fictional works have garnered wider attention from scholars of literature and theory, particularly those interested in women's studies, identity politics, and narrative theory. This study analyzes how Andreas-Salomé depicted women in her fictional works just as feminism was emerging, revealing a complex engagement with questions of narrative and identity. More than mere thematic explorations of women's changing roles in society, her works investigate the concept of identity and its relationship to gender, sexuality, and narrative representation. She is as concerned with a cultural crisis of femininity and masculinity as with the identity crises of her individual women characters. This book offers the best account of Andreas-Salomé's literary works, de-emphasizing biographical and psychoanalytical perspectives but taking into account the sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts in which they were written. It also adds to contemporary theoretical discourses on gender, feminism, and identity. Muriel Cormican is professor of German at the University of West Georgia, Carrollton, Georgia.

The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature
  • Checking in to Tell a Story
  • Bettina Matthias
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    16 August 2006
  • As the bourgeois concept of 'home' became problematic after important changes in German-speaking society during the 19th century, many fiction writers chose the literary setting of the hotel to explore the status of the individual and the notions of public and private. As social microcosms, hotels are fitting experimental settings for literary inquiries into the tension between the individual's quest for a place in the world and the technocratic rationalism of modern life. The book has two parts, the first establishing the cultural and theoretical context and the second providing analyses of literary works set in hotels. A brief history of commercial hospitality and a chapter establishing the theoretical framework of the hotel as a paradigmatic, ambivalent, semi-public, and stage-like modern space lead to readings of texts by Schnitzler, Zweig, Werfel, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Joseph Roth, and Vicki Baum. BETTINA MATTHIAS is associate professor of German at Middlebury College.

Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass's 'The Tin Drum'
  • Peter Arnds
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    06 August 2004
  • In receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, Günter Grass, a prominent and controversial figure in the ongoing discussion of the German past and reunification, finally gained recognition as Germany's greatest living author, a writer of international importance and acclaim. Grass's 1959 novel 'The Tin Drum' remains one of the most important works of literature for the construction of postwar German identity. Peter Arnds offers a completely new reading of the novel, analyzing an aspect of Grass's literary treatment of German history that has never been examined in detail: the Nazi ideology of race and eugenics, which resulted in the persecution of so-called asocials as 'life unworthy of life,' their extermination in psychiatric institutions in the Third Reich, and their marginalization in the Adenauer period. Arnds shows that in order to represent the Nazi past and subvert bourgeois paradigms of rationalism, Grass revives several facets of popular culture that National Socialism either suppressed or manipulated for its ideology of racism. In structure and content Grass's novel connects the persecution of degenerate art to the persecution and extermination of these 'asocials,' for whom the persecuted dwarf-protagonist Oskar Matzerath becomes a central metaphor and voice. This comparative study reveals that Grass creates in the novel an irrational counterculture opposed to the rationalism of Nazi science and its obsession with racial hygiene, while simultaneously exposing the continuity of this destructive rationalism in postwar Germany and the absurdity of a 'Stunde Null,' that putative tabula rasa in 1945. Peter O. Arnds is associate professor of German and Italian at Kansas State University.

Housebound
  • Selfhood and Domestic Space in Contemporary German Fiction
  • Monika Shafi
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 October 2012
  • In life and in fiction, houses are compelling objects that shape an impressive range of personal and public affairs. A house embodies experiences often intensely emotional, and it also represents both a major financial investment and a material reality embedded in architectural, aesthetic, and social traditions. The house, the place where we try to be at home, can be regarded - as theorists from Gaston Bachelard to Edward S. Casey have argued - as the key space for our constructions of selfhood and belonging. A host of contemporary German narratives featuring houses highlight this relationship between selfhood and domestic space. Beginning with a historical and theoretical overview of the house in German literature, 'Housebound' analyzes the shelters - often highly ambivalent spaces - that writers such as Katharina Hacker, Arno Geiger, Walter Kappacher, Monika Maron, Jenny Erpenbeck, Judith Hermann, Barbara Honigmann, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar build in their texts and what these reveal about contemporary selfhood in Germany and its relationship to the social world. The concluding comparative analysis of Katharina Hacker's 'Die Habenichtse' and the English novelist Ian McEwan's 'Saturday' reveals these developments in another national literature and makes a case for the global appeal of the domestic as a major site of identity politics. Monika Shafi is the Elias Ahuja Professor of German and Chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware.

Freud's Theory and its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies
  • An Introduction
  • Henk de Berg
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    12 September 2012
    Print publication:
    13 December 2002
  • A genuinely accessible introduction to Freud's theory and its application to literary and cultural studies. Few figures have had as much influence on Western thought as Sigmund Freud. His ideas permeate our culture to such a degree that an understanding of them is indispensable. Yet many otherwise well-informed students in the humanities labor under misconceptions about Freudian theory. There are countless introductions to Freudian psychoanalysis but, surprisingly, none that combine a genuinely accessible account of Freud's ideas with an introduction to their use in literary and cultural studies, as this book does. Written specifically for use by advanced undergraduate and graduate students in courses dealing with literary and cultural criticism, it is also of interest to the general reader. The first part of the book explains Freud's key ideas and refutes many popular misconceptions, using examples throughout. The assumption underlying this account is that Freud offers not simply a model of the mind, but an analysis of the relation between the individual and society. The second part addresses the implications of Freudian psychoanalysis for the study of literature and culture, again using plentiful examples. Existing books focus either on Freudian psychoanalysis in general or on psychoanalytic literary or cultural criticism; the latter tend to be abstract and theoretical in nature. None of them are suitable for readers who are interested in psychoanalysis as a tool for literary and cultural criticism but have no firm knowledge of Freud's ideas. 'Freud's Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies' fills this gap. Henk de Berg is Professor of German at the University of Sheffield, UK.

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