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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 7 of 13

A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism
  • Edited by Neil H. Donahue
  • With contributions by Richard T. Gray , Sabine Hake , James Rolleston , Ernst Schuerer , Francis Michael Sharp , Walter H. Sokel , Klaus Weissenberger , Perry Willett , Rhys W. Williams and Barbara D. Wright
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    28 April 2017
    Print publication:
    10 October 2005
  • More than any other avant-garde movement, German Expressionism captures the aesthetic revolution of 20th-century modernity in all its contrasts and conflicts. In continuous eruptions from 1905 to 1925, Expressionism upset reigning practices in the arts, most vividly in painting and the visual arts. In the literature, a heady intellectualism combined with dramatic gesture, graphic visions, exuberant emotions and urgent proclamations to forge forceful styles of verbal expression. Expressionism introduced into art both visual and verbal a shockingly new intensity with many facets and many faces.This volume presents the literature of German Expressionism, which is far less known in the English-speaking world, with essays by leading scholars on Expressionism's philosophical origins, its thematic preoccupations, and its divergent stylistic manifestations by writers whose common bond is intensity and whose lines on the page read like the gouges of a woodcut: Georg Kaiser, Walter Hasenclever,and Ernst Toller in drama; Gottfried Benn, Georg Heym, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Georg Trakl in poetry; Alfred Döblin, Carl Einstein, and Carl Sternheim in prose, to name just a few. Against the background of the journals, exhibitions, and anthologies, the café meeting places and public life of Expressionism, the volume's highly focused, intrinsic analyses of texts and comprehensive overviews of extrinsic contexts (and of the most up-to-date research) shows the fervor and complexity of the period and its effulgent literary formations.

    Neil H. Donahue is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Hofstra University.

A Companion to the Works of Thomas Bernhard
  • With contributions by Mark M. Anderson , Paola Bozzi , Stephen D. Dowden , Ruediger Goerner , Gitta Honegger , Jonathan Long , Dagmar C. G. Lorenz , Willy Riemer , Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler , Marlene Streeruwitz and Andrew J. Webber
  • Edited by Matthias Konzett
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    28 April 2017
    Print publication:
    01 September 2002
  • Since the death of Thomas Bernhard in 1989, the literary reputation of this complex and unique writer has risen to the point that he is now regarded as a major European figure. Bernhard emerged in the 1960s as one of Austria's major writers, challenging the popularity of such established writers as Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass on the German literary scene. His idiosyncratic prose consists of a tragic-comic blend of themes such as suicide, madness, and isolation combined with highly satirical and histrionic invectives against culture, tradition, and society. As a skillful impresario of public scandals by means of verbal assaults upon Austrian elite culture, Bernhard also earned himself the epithet of Übertreibungskünstler (artist of exaggeration). In this art of cultural and political provocation Bernhard remains unmatched to the present day. This volume of essays provides contributions by well-known critics that examine the most salient aspects of Bernhard's work, offering insights into literary strategies and public themes that made Bernhard one of Europe's masters of modern prose and drama. Essays examine Bernhard's complex artistic sensibility, his impact on Austria's critical memory, his relation to the legacy of Austrian Jewish culture, his representative value as Austria's prime literary export, and his cosmopolitanism and its significance for the rapidly changing multicultural landscape of Europe. Matthias Konzett is Associate Professor of German at Yale University. He is the author of The Rhetoric of National Dissent in Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek (Camden House, 2000).

A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann
  • With contributions by Ehrhard Bahr , Manfred Dierks , Werner Frizen , Helmut Koopmann , Wolfgang Lederer , Hannelore Mundt , Peter Puetz , Jens Rieckmann , Hans-Joachim Sandberg , Egon Schwarz and Hans Rudolf Vaget
  • Edited by Herbert Lehnert, Eva Wessell
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    28 April 2017
    Print publication:
    29 July 2004
  • Thomas Mann is among the greatest of German prose writers, and was the first German novelist to reach a wide English-speaking readership since Goethe. Novels such as Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doktor Faustus attest to his mastery of subtle, distanced irony, while novellas such as Death in Venice reveal him at the height of his mastery of language. In addition to fresh insights about these best-known works of Mann, this volume treats less-often-discussed works such as Joseph and His Brothers, Lotte in Weimar, and Felix Krull, as well as his political writings and essays. Mann himself was a paradox: his role as family-father was both refuge and façade; his love of Germany was matched by his contempt for its having embraced Hitler. While in exile during the Nazi period, he functioned as the prime representative of the "good" Germany in the fight against fascism, and he has often been remembered this way in English-speaking lands. But a new view of Mann is emerging half a century after his death: a view of him as one of the great writers of a modernity understood as extending into our 21st century. This volume provides sixteen essays by American and European specialists. They demonstrate the relevance of his writings for our time, making particular use of the biographical material that is now available.Contributors: Ehrhard Bahr, Manfred Dierks, Werner Frizen, Clayton Koelb, Helmut Koopmann, Wolfgang Lederer, Hannelore Mundt, Peter Pütz, Jens Rieckmann, Hans Joachim Sandberg, Egon Schwarz, and Hans Vaget.Herbert Lehnert is Research Professor, and Eva Wessell is lecturer in Humanities, both at the University of California, Irvine.

An Anthology of German Novellas
  • Edited by Siegfried Weing
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    28 April 2017
    Print publication:
    01 September 2003
  • This new collection, intended for the student and the interested general reader of German alike, includes both traditional examples, and those which fall outside the usual canon. The sixteen novellasin the volume have been carefully chosen on the bases of length, historical significance, popularity, and interest, and have been extensively glossed by the editor, who also provides an introduction to the history and theory of the genre.

    Siegfried Weing is Professor of Modern Languages at the Virginia Military Institute.

A Companion to the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
  • Edited by Barbara Fischer, Thomas C. Fox
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    28 April 2017
    Print publication:
    05 December 2005
  • One of the most independent thinkers in German intellectual history, the Enlightenment author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) contributed in decisive and lasting fashion to literature, philosophy, theology, criticism, and drama theory. Lessing invented the bürgerliches Trauerspiel (bourgeois tragedy) and wrote one of the first successful German tragedies as well as one of the finest German comedies. In his final dramatic masterpiece, Nathan der Weise, he writes of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, of religious tolerance and intolerance and the clash of civilizations. Lessing's dramas are the oldest German theater pieces still regularly performed (both in Germany and internationally), and both his plays and his drama theory have influenced such writers as Goethe, Schiller, Hebbel, Hauptmann, Ibsen, Strindberg, Schnitzler, and Brecht. Addressing an audience ranging from graduate students to seasoned scholars, this volume introduces Lessing's life and times and places him within the broader context of the European Enlightenment. It discusses his pathbreaking dramas, his equally revolutionary theoretical, critical, and aesthetic writings, his original fables, his innovative work in philosophy and theology, and his significant contributions to Jewish emancipation. The volume concludes by examining 20th-century reception of Lessing and his oeuvre.

    Contributors: Barbara Fischer, Thomas C. Fox, Steven D. Martinson, Klaus L. Berghahn, John Pizer, Beate Allert, H. B. Nisbet, Arno Schilson, Willi Goetschel, Peter Höyng, Karin A. Wurst, Ann Schmiesing, Reinhart Meyer, Hans-Joachim Kertscher, Hinrich C. Seeba, Dieter Fratzke, Helmut Berthold, Herbert Rowland.

    Barbara Fischer is Associate Professor of German and Thomas C. Fox is Professor of German, both at the University of Alabama.

A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist
  • With contributions by Sean Allan , Bernhard Greiner , Jost Hermand , Tim Mehigan , Jeffery L. Sammons , Helmut J. Schneider , Hinrich C. Seeba , Anthony Stephens , Bianca Theisen and Susanne Zantop
  • Edited by Bernd Fischer
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 April 2017
    Print publication:
    03 May 2003
  • For over 150 years, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) has been one of the most widely read and performed German authors. His status in the literary canon is firmly established, but he has always been one of Germany's most contentiously discussed authors. Today's critical debate on his unique prose narratives and dramas is as heated as ever. Many critics regard Kleist as a lone presager of the aesthetics and philosophies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernism. Yet there can be no question that he responds in his works and letters to the philosophical, aesthetic, and political debates of his time. During the last thirty years, the scholarship on Kleist's work and life has departed from the existentialist wave of the 1950s and early 1960s and opened up new avenues for comingto terms with his unusual talent. The present volume brings together the most important and innovative of these newer scholarly approaches: the essays include critically informed, up-to-date interpretations of Kleist's most-discussed stories and dramas. Other contributions analyze Kleist's literary means and styles and their theoretical underpinnings. They include articles on Kleist's narrative and theatrical technique, poetic and aesthetic theory, philosophical and political thought, and insights from new biographical research.

    Contributors: Jeffrey L. Sammons, Jost Hermand, Anthony Stephens, Bianca Theisen, Hinrich C. Seeba, Bernhard Greiner, Helmut J. Schneider, Tim Mehigan, Susanne Zantop, Hilda M. Brown, and Seán Allan.

    Bernd Fischer is Professor of German andHead of the Department of German at Ohio State University.

A Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin
  • With contributions by Christoph Bartscherer , David Dollenmayer , Roland Dollinger , Neil H. Donahue , Wolfgang Duesing , Veronika Fuechtner , Helmuth Kiesel , Erich Kleinschmidt , Klaus Mueller-Salget , Helmut F. Pfanner and Gabriele Sander
  • Edited by Roland Dollenmayer, Wulf Koepke, Heidi Thomann Tewarson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 April 2017
    Print publication:
    15 December 2003
  • Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) was one of the great German-Jewish writers of the 20th century, a major figure in the German avant-garde before the First World War and a leading intellectual during the Weimar Republic. Döblin greatly influenced the history of the German novel: his best-known work, the best-selling 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, has frequently been compared in its use of internal monologue and literary montage to James Joyce's Ulysses and John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer . Döblin's oeuvre is by no means limited to novels, but in this genre, he offered a surprising variety of narrative techniques, themes, structures, and outlooks. Döblin's impact on German writers after the Second World War was considerable: Günter Grass, for example, acknowledged him as "my teacher." And yet, while Alexanderplatz continues to fascinate the reading public, it has overshadowed the rest of Döblin's immense oeuvre. This volume of carefully focused essays seeks to do justice to such important texts as Döblin's early stories, his numerous other novels, his political, philosophical, medical, autobiographical, and religious essays, his experimental plays, and his writings on the new media of cinema and radio.Contributors: Heidi Thomann Tewarson, David Dollenmayer, Neil H. Donahue, Roland Dollinger, Veronika Fuechtner, Gabriele Sander, Erich Kleinschmidt, Wulf Koepke, Helmut F. Pfanner, Helmuth Kiesel, Klaus Müller-Salget, Christoph Bartscherer, Wolfgang Düsing.Roland Dollinger is associate professor of German at Sarah Lawrence College; Wulf Koepke is professor emeritus of German at Texas A&M University; Heidi Thomann Tewarson is professor of German at Oberlin College.

A Companion to the Works of Hartmann von Aue
  • With contributions by Melitta Weiss Adamson , Will Hasty , Alexandra S. Hellenbrand , W. H. Jackson , Rüdiger Krohn , Scott Pincikowski , James A. Rushing, Jr , Frank Tobin and Alois Wolf
  • Edited by Francis G. Gentry
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 April 2017
    Print publication:
    25 December 2004
  • In perhaps 25 years of creative productivity (ca. 1180-ca. 1205), Hartmann von Aue authored a dispute about love between the body and the heart, Die Klage, numerous songs of courtly love, crusading songs, and most likely took part in a Crusade himself. He composed the first German Arthurian romance, Erec, based on Chrétien's like-named work, and he -- apparently -- ended his literarycareer with a second, Iwein. Further, he is the creator of two provocative rel-igious-didactic works, Gregorius, a tale of double incest, repentance, and redemption, and Der arme Heinrich, the account of a seemingly perfect nobleman who is stricken with leprosy and then ultimately cured by a process set into motion by a very young peasant girl, whom he ultimately marries. Noother medieval German poet treats such an extraordinary breadth of themes at such a high level of artistic expression. The essays in this volume, written by scholars from North America and Europe, offer insight into many aspects of Hartmann's oeuvre, including the medieval and modern visual and literary reception of his works. The volume also offers considerations of Hartmann and Chrétien;Hartmann's putative theological background and the influence of the Bible on his tales; the reflection of his medical knowledge in Der arme Heinrich and Iwein; and a complete survey of his lyric production. Newer avenues of research are also presented, with essays on issues of gender and on the role of pain as a constitutive part of the courtly experience. It is hoped that this volume will prove to be a stimulating companion not only for those familiar with Hartmann but also for those who are just making the acquaintance of one of the greatest of medieval German poets.

    Francis G. Gentry is Professor Emeritus of German at the Pennsylvania State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A Companion to the Works of Grimmelshausen
  • With contributions by Italo Michele Battafarano , Dieter Breuer , Shannon Keenan Greene , Klaus Haberkamm , Peter Hess , D. Menhennet , Christoph E. Schweitzer , Andreas Solbach and Rosmarie Zeller
  • Edited by Karl F. Otto
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 April 2017
    Print publication:
    13 December 2002
  • Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (ca. 1621-1676) is the most significant (and still readable) author of seventeenth-century German novels. His Abenteuerlicher Simplicius Simplicissimusremains the one German novel of its time that has attained the stature of "world literature": its unique mix of violent action and solitary reflection, its superlative humor, its realistic portrayalof a peasant turned soldier turned hermit has made it the longest-running bestseller in German literature. Read by students and scholars in comparative literature, history, and German, and by those interested in the development of the picaresque novel in Europe, the work and its "Continuations" have increasingly occupied scholars around the world, who have in recent years shown it to be a work ofsubtle structure and characterization, bearing the imprint of the most advanced political thinking of the time, and showing the influences of some of the most significant works of world literature, including Cervantes' Don Quixote and Barclay's Argenis. This volume of essays by leading Grimmelshausen scholars from Germany, the United States, and England provides analyses of significant topics in his life and works, including questions of genre, structure, satire, allegory, narratology, political thought, religion, morality, humor, realism, and mortality.
    Contributors: Christoph E. Schweitzer, Italo Michele Battafarano, Klaus Haberkamm, Rosmarie Zeller, Andreas Solbach, Dieter Breuer, Lynne Tatlock, Peter Hess, Shannon Keenan Greene, and Alan Menhennet.

    KarlF. Otto is Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania and has written extensively on German Baroque literature.

A Companion to German Realism 1848-1900
  • With contributions by Kirsten Belgum , Nina Berman , Russell A. Berman , Irene Stocksiecker Di Maio , Thomas C. Fox , Robert C. Holub , Brent O. Peterson , John Pizer , Hans J. Rindisbacher , Jeffrey L. Sammons and Robert Tobin
  • Edited by Todd Kontje
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 April 2017
    Print publication:
    16 July 2002
  • This volume of new essays by leading scholars treats a representative sampling of German realist prose from the period 1848 to 1900, the period of its dominance of the German literary landscape. It includes essays on familiar, canonical authors -- Stifter, Freytag, Raabe, Fontane, Thomas Mann -- and canonical texts, but also considers writers frequently omitted from traditional literary histories, such as Luise Mühlbach, Friedrich Spielhagen, Louise von François, Karl May, and Eugenie Marlitt. The introduction situates German realism in the context of both German literary history and of developments in other European literatures, and surveys the most prominent critical studies of ninteenth-century realism. The essays treat the following topics: Stifter's Brigitta and the lesson of realism; Mühlbach, Ranke, and the truth of historical fiction; regional histories as national history in Freytag's Die Ahnen; gender and nation in Louise von François's historical fiction; theory, reputation, and the career of Friedrich Spielhagen; Wilhelm Raabe and the German colonial experience; the poetics of work in Freytag, Stifter, and Raabe; Jewish identity in Berthold Auerbach's novels; Eugenie Marlitt's narratives of virtuous desire; the appeal of Karl May in the Wilhelmine Empire; Thomas Mann's portrayal of male-male desire in his early short fiction; and Fontane's Effi Briest and the end of realism. Contributors: Robert C. Holub, Brent O. Petersen, Lynne Tatlock, Thomas C. Fox, Jeffrey L. Sammons, John Pizer, Hans J. Rindisbacher, Irene S. Di Maio, Kirsten Belgum, Nina Berman, Robert Tobin, Russell A. Berman. Todd Kontje is professor of German at the University of California, San Diego.

Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc
  • Between Surveillance and Life Writing
  • With contributions by Alison Lewis , Aniko Szucs , Annie Ring , Carol Anne Costabile-Heming , Ulrike Garde and Yuliya Komska
  • Edited by Corina L. Petrescu, Valentina Glajar
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    20 April 2017
    Print publication:
    15 December 2016
  • The communist secret police services of Central and Eastern Europe kept detailed records not only of their victims but also of the vast networks of informants and collaborators upon whom their totalitarian systems depended. These records, now open to the public in many former Eastern Bloc countries, reflect a textually mediated reality that has defined and shaped the lives of former victims and informers, creating a tension between official records and personal memories. Exploring this tension between a textually and technically mediated past and the subject/victim's reclaiming and retrospective interpretation of that past in biography is the goal of this volume. While victims' secret police files have often been examined as a type of unauthorized archival life writing, the contributors tothis volume are among the first to analyze the fragmentary and sometimes remedial nature of these biographies and to examine the subject/victims' rewriting and remediation of them in various creativeforms. Essays focus, variously, on the files of the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate (in relation to Transylvanian Germans in Romania), and the Hungarian State Security Agency.

    Contributors: Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Ulrike Garde, Valentina Glajar, Yuliya Komska, Alison Lewis, Corina L. Petrescu, Annie Ring, Aniko Szucs.

    Valentina Glajar is Professor of German at Texas State University, San Marcos. Alison Lewis is Professor of German in the School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne, Australia. Corina L. Petrescu is Associate Professorof German at the University of Mississippi.

A Companion to the Works of Stefan George
  • With contributions by Paul Bishop , Marita Keilson-Lauritz , Michael Metzger , Ritchie Robertson , Karla L. Schultz , Jeffrey Todd , Robert Vilain , William Waters and Michael Winkler
  • Edited by Jens Rieckmann
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    13 April 2017
    Print publication:
    14 February 2005
  • Stefan George (1868-1933) is along with Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke one of the pre-eminent German poets of the twentieth century. He also had an important, albeit controversial and provocative role in German cultural history. It is generally agreed that he played a significant part in the transition of German literature to Modernism, particularly in poetry. At the same time he was an outspoken critic of modernity. He believed that only an all-encompassing cultural renewal could save modern man. Although George is often linked with the l'art pour l'art movement, and although his artistic consciousness was formed by European aestheticism, his poetry and the writings that emerged from the poets and intellectuals he gathered around him in the George Circle are above all a scathing commentary on the political, social, and cultural situation in Germany at the turn of the century.
    George, who was imbued with the idea of the poet as a prophet and priest, saw himself as the Messiah of a New Hellenism and a New Reich led by an intellectual and aesthetic elite consisting of men who were bonded together through their allegiance to a charismatic leader. Some of the values that George proclaimed, among them a glorification of power, of heroism and self-sacrifice, were seized upon by the National Socialists, and subsequently his writings and those of his circle were considered by some to be proto-fascist. It did not help his reputation that after the Second World War much of the criticism of his works was practiced by uncritical, hagiographic George worshippers. In recent years, however, there has been a renewed and unbiased interest among scholars and critics in George and his circle. The wide-ranging and original essays in this volume explore anew George's poetry and his contribution to Modernism, the relation between his vision of a New Reich and fascist ideology, and his importance as a cultural critic.

    Jens Rieckmann is Professor of German at the University of California, Irvine.

German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America
  • Reception, Adaptation, Transformation
  • With contributions by Eric Ames , Kirsten Belgum , Jeffrey A. Grossman , Robert C. Holub , Claudia Liebrand , Paul Michael Luetzeler , Linda Rugg , Jeffery L. Sammons , Hinrich C. Seeba , Lorie A. Vanchena , Gerhard Weiss and Gerhild Scholz Williams
  • Edited by Matt Erlin, Lynne Tatlock
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    13 April 2017
    Print publication:
    12 November 2005
  • Building on recent trends in the humanities and especially on scholarship done under the rubric of cultural transfer, this volume emphasizes the processes by which Americans took up, responded to, and transformed German cultural material for their own purposes. The fourteen essays by scholars from the US and Germany treat such topics as translation, the reading of German literature in America, the adaptation of German ideas and educational ideals, the reception and transformation of European genres of writing, and the status of the "German" and the "European" in celebrations of American culture and criticisms of American racism. The volume contributes to the ongoing re-conception of American culture as significantly informed by non-English-speaking European cultures. It also participates in the efforts of historians and literary scholars to re-theorize the construction of national cultures. Questions regarding hybridity, cultural agency, and strategies of acculturation have long been at the center of postcolonial studies, but as this volume demonstrates, these phenomena are not merely operative in encounters between colonizers and colonized: they are also fundamental to the early American reception and appropriation of German cultural materials.

    Contributors: Hinrich C. Seeba, Eric Ames, Claudia Liebrand, Paul Michael Lützeler, Kirsten Belgum, Robert C. Holub, Jeffrey Grossman, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Linda Rugg, Gerhild Scholz Williams, Gerhard Weiss, Lorie Vanchena.

    Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities andMatt Erlin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, both at Washington University in St. Louis.

Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism
  • Writing Images
  • Brad Prager
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    13 April 2017
    Print publication:
    04 March 2007
  • The work of the groundbreaking writers and artists of German Romanticism -- including the writers Tieck, Brentano, and Eichendorff and the artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge -- followed from the philosophical arguments of the German Idealists, who placed emphasis on exploring the subjective space of the imagination. The Romantic perspective was a form of engagement with Idealist discourses, especially Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Fichte's Science of Knowledge. Through an aggressive, speculative reading of Kant, the Romantics abandoned the binary distinction between the palpable outer world and the ungraspable space of the mind's eye and were therefore compelled to develop new terms for understanding the distinction between "internal" and "external." In this light, Brad Prager urges a reassessment of some of Romanticism's major oppositional tropes, contending that binaries such as "self and other," "symbol and allegory," and "light and dark," should be understood as alternatives to Lessing's distinction between interior and exterior worlds. Prager thus crosses the boundaries between philosophy, literature, and art history to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience, examining the interplay of text and image in the formulation of Romantic epistemology.

    Brad Prager is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Novel Affinities
  • Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795-1830
  • Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 July 2016
    Print publication:
    15 May 2016
  • The novel, according to standard scholarly narratives, depicts an individual's path to maturity. Scholarship on the rise of the novel in Germany and in Europe more broadly, from Watt to Moretti, has essentially collapsed the genre into the individualist Bildungsroman, exemplified by a narrow canon. This study challenges and nuances these narratives, first by expanding the focus from the individual to the family, second by broadening the field of novels treated to include not only canonical works but also so-called "trivial literature," and third, by reading novels alongside contemporarybiological, legal, and pedagogical texts. This perspective reveals that the novel and the family around 1800 were mutually constitutive and that the two together were instrumental in the developmentof conceptions of individuality, kinship, and society that are still relevant today. Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge reads novels by Goethe, Wolzogen, Engel, Karoline Fischer, August Lafontaine, and Brentano, showing that they exhibit varying degrees of "imaginative didacticism": suggestions not of what to think and feel, but that thinking and feeling in reaction to literature are centralto cultural practices of self-reflection and development. The family is a crucial locus for this practice, and reading novels together with non-literary texts illuminates how they experiment productively with the infinite possibilities presented by the relationships they portray.

    Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Mountain of Destiny
  • Nanga Parbat and Its Path into the German Imagination
  • Harald Höbusch
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 July 2016
    Print publication:
    01 June 2016
  • Never has a mountain occupied the German imagination longer and more thoroughly than Nanga Parbat (8,125m), the world's ninth-highest peak, located in the extreme western part of the Himalaya chain inpresent-day Pakistan. Repeatedly referred to in the 1930s as the German "mountain of destiny," over a period of roughly two decades from 1932 to 1953 Nanga Parbat became not only the destination of six German mountaineering expeditions, but also the quintessential German "mountain of the mind" onto whose slopes German mountaineers, mountaineering officials, politicians, writers, and filmmakers projected some of the most pressing social, political, and cultural concerns of their times. This book is a detailed study of that process: of the initial motivations of post-World War I mountaineers for attempting to scale one of the tallest mountains in the world, of the appropriation of this epic mountaineering challenge by National Socialism, of the reappropriation of the Nanga Parbat project during the early years of the German Federal Republic. And most important - since to date such an approach is almost completely absent from existing studies of Himalaya mountaineering of this era - it is a study of the means and mechanisms, the texts and contexts employed for communicating these high-altitude mountaineering exploits to the German public and thereby inscribing Nanga Parbat into the German imagination.

    Harald Höbusch is Associate Professor of German and Associate Chair of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Kentucky.

New Poems
  • Rainer Maria Rilke
  • Translated by Len Krisak
  • Introduction by George C. Schoolfield
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 July 2016
    Print publication:
    15 October 2015
  • Rainer Maria Rilke, the most famous (and important) German language poet of the twentieth century - a master to be ranked with Goethe and Heine - wrote the New Poems of 1907 and 1908 in transition from his late-nineteenth-century style. They mark his appearance as a lyrical, metaphysical poet of the modernist sensibility, often using traditional forms like the sonnet to explore the inner essence, the deep heart, of things - often, quite literally, things. Influenced by his time spent as Rodin's secretary, Rilke turned to quotidian life and sought to artistically redeem it in all its possibilities. His exquisite use of meter and rhyme marks him as a "formalist" and yet a contemporary of Eliot and the later Yeats, so this translation follows, as closely as English allows, the formal properties of the original poems, in a line-for-line version, while trying to capture the spare diction and direct idioms of modernism.

    Len Krisak is a recipient of the Richard Wilbur, Robert Penn Warren, and Robert Frost prizes in poetry. He has published more than five hundred poems, including translations from the Latin, Greek, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and German.

The Writers' State
  • Constructing East German Literature, 1945-1959
  • Stephen Brockmann
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2016
    Print publication:
    21 December 2015
  • Twenty-five years after the demise of the German Democratic Republic, there is perhaps more scholarship being produced on all aspects of that country than ever. This is true also in the field of literary studies, but especially in English-language literary scholarship there has been a strong imbalance toward a focus on the last three decades of GDR literature. The literature of the earlier GDR has mostly been dismissed or ignored by scholars, as the discontinuities between the early and late GDR have been emphasized over the considerable continuities. This book seeks to redress that state of affairs, examining the literature produced from the very beginnings of what became the GDR through the 1950s. In doing so it applies to GDR literature the insight gained by scholars over the past few decades that the immediate postwar period was more complex, more meaningful, and more rewarding of study than it was long deemed to be. Far from all being mere propaganda or rote socialist realism, the literature of the early GDR has much to tell us about the budding socialist state, even as it goes far in explaining the developments in the later GDR.

    Stephen Brockmann is Professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University.

Catastrophe and Catharsis
  • Perspectives on Disaster and Redemption in German Culture and Beyond
  • Edited by Katharina Gerstenberger, Tanja Nusser
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2016
    Print publication:
    08 December 2015
  • Destroying human habitat and taking human lives, disasters, be they natural, man-made, or a combination, threaten large populations, even entire nations and societies. They also disrupt the existing order and cause discontinuity in our sense of self and our perceptions of the world. To restore order, not only must human beings be rescued and affected areas rebuilt, but the reality of the catastrophe must also be transformed into narrative. The essays in this collection examine representations of disaster in literature, film, and mass media in German and international contexts, exploring the nexus between disruption and recovery through narrative from the eighteenth century to the present. Topics include the Lisbon earthquake, the Paris Commune, the Hamburg and Dresden fire-bombings in the Second World War, nuclear disasters in Alexander Kluge's films, the filmic aesthetics of catastrophe, Yoko Tawada's lectures on the Fukushima disaster and Christa Wolf's novel Störfall in light of that same disaster, Joseph Haslinger and the tsunami of 2004, traditions regarding avalanche disaster in the Tyrol, and the problems and implications of defining disaster.

    Contributors:Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Yasemin Dayioglu-Yücel, Janine Hartman, Jan Hinrichsen, Claudia Jerzak, Lars Koch, Franz Mauelshagen, Tanja Nusser, Torsten Pflugmacher, Christoph Weber.

    Katharina Gerstenberger is Professor and Chair of the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of Utah. Tanja Nusser is DAAD Visiting Associate Professor of German at the University of Cincinnati.

Stefan Zweig and World Literature
  • Twenty-First Century Perspectives
  • Edited by Birger Vanwesenbeeck, Mark H. Gelber
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 May 2015
    Print publication:
    29 December 2014
  • The twenty-first century has seen a renewed surge of cultural and critical interest in the works of the Austrian-Jewish author Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), who was among the most-read and -acclaimed authors worldwide in the 1920s and 1930s but after 1945 fell into critical disfavor and relative obscurity. The resurgence in interest in Zweig and his works is attested to by, among other things, new English translations and editions of his works; a Brazilian motion picture and a best-selling French novel about his final days; and a renewed debate surrounding the literary quality of his work in the London Review of Books. This global return to Zweig calls for a critical reassessment of his legacy and works, which the current collection of essays provides by approaching them from a global perspective as opposed to the narrow European focus through which they have been traditionally approached. Together, the introduction and twelve essays engage the totality of Zweig's published and unpublished works from his drama and his fiction to his letters and his biographies, and from his literary and art criticism to his autobiography. Contributors: Jeffrey B. Berlin, Richard Benson, Darién J. Davis, Marlen Eckl, Mark H. Gelber, Robert Kelz, Klemens Renoldner, Birger Vanwesenbeeck, John Warren, Klaus Weissenberger, Robert Weldon Whalen, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. Birger Vanwesenbeeck is Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York-Fredonia. Mark H. Gelber is Professor of German at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.

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