German

The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also...

Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop at Duke University, the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish studies. It publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies and serves as a venue for...

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...

New essays on the most prominent German dramatist and short-story writer of the early 19th century. 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...

Christa Wolf (1929-), Ingeborg Drewitz (1923-1986), and Grete Weil (1906-1999) occupy very different positions in postwar German literature, yet all three challenge readers to consider how individuals understand their roles in history and how they...

The theme of women and death is pervasive in the German culture of the past five centuries. With the conviction that only an interdisciplinary approach can explore a typology as far-reaching and significant as this, and in accordance with the feminist...

Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital is a broad study of German cultural history since 1500, with particular emphasis on the period since 1800. It explores the ways in which Germans have imagined Nuremberg as a cultural and spiritual capital, focusing...

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...

Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop, which was inaugurated at Duke University in 2009 and is now held at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing forum in...

The interrelationship between music and literature reached its zenith during the Romantic era, and nowhere was this relationship more pronounced than in Germany. Many representatives of literary and philosophical German Romanticism held music to be the...

Since its publication in 1947, Thomas Mann's daring treatment of the Faust theme has generated diverse reactions from the critics, and continues to provoke controversies. This volume traces the history of its critical reception. Topics considered include...

Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice is one of the most famous and widely read texts in all of modern literature, raising such issues as beauty and decadence, eros and irony, and aesthetics and morality. The amount and variety of criticism on the...

The High Middle Ages, and particularly the period from 1180 to 1230, saw the beginnings of a vibrant literary culture in the German vernacular. While significant literary achievements in German had already been made in earlier centuries, they were a...

Two Studies of Friedrich Hoelderlin shows how the poet enacts a radical theory of meaning that culminates in a unique and still groundbreaking concept of revolution, one that begins with a revolutionary understanding of language. The product of an...

Vienna's Dreams of Europe puts forward a convincing counter-narrative to the prevailing story of Austria's place in Europe since the Enlightenment. For a millennium, Austrian writers have used images of Europe and its hegemonic culture as their political...

The works of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) -- an innovative and resonant tragedian and an important poet, essayist, historian, and aesthetic theorist -- are among the best known of German and world literature. Schiller's explosive original artistry and...

How to gauge the impact of cultural products is an old question, but bureaucratic agendas such as the one recently implemented in the UK to measure the impact of university research (including in German Studies) are new. Impact is seen as confirming a...

A century before psychoanalytic discourse codified a scientific language to describe the landscape of the mind, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe explored the paradoxes of an interior self separate from a conscious self. Though long acknowledged by the...

Goethe was a master of the short prose form. His two narrative cycles, Conversations of German Refugees and Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, both written during a high point of his career, address various social issues and reveal his experimentation...

Originally published in 1952, this book provides a detailed critical analysis of 40 German lyrics. All the poems analysed are reprinted in full, so that criticism may be checked by reference to the original text. The book therefore provides a unique...

Professor Born's book provides a phonological, grammatical, and lexical description of a German-American dialect that has never before been studied. It compares the Michigan Frankenmuth dialect with its parent dialect in central Franconia. The town...

In recent decades, life writing has exploded in popularity: memoirs that focus on traumatic experiences now constitute the largest growth sector in book publishing worldwide. But life writing is not only highly marketable; it also does important...

A study of how Nanga Parbat, the ninth-highest peak on earth, became the German "mountain of the mind." Never has a mountain occupied the German imagination longer and more thoroughly than Nanga Parbat (8,125m), the world's ninth-highest peak,...

This book explores how writers adhered to, played with, and subverted the formulaic precepts of educational transformation in the German Democratic Republic. Perhaps never before has a state emphasized education to citizenship more than in the new...

The healthcare system of the German Democratic Republic, based on Soviet models, reflected the importance the socialist state assigned the health both of its citizens and of the metaphorical national body meant to represent and promulgate the nation's...

Established, commissioned, and edited by the Department of German at the University of Edinburgh, the Edinburgh German Yearbook is the only peer-reviewed German Studies publication that each year invites scholarly contributions on a single topic of...

Twenty years on from the dramatic events that led to the opening of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the GDR, the subjective dimension of German unification is still far from complete. The nature of the East German state remains a matter of cultural...

New essays providing a in-depth view of the many facets of the great world poet's work. Friedrich Schiller is not merely one of Germany's foremost poets. He is also one of the major German contributors to world literature. The undying words he gave to...

In Western culture, women are often linked with death, perhaps because they are traditionally constructed as an unknowable "other." The first two Women and Death volumes investigate ideas about death and the feminine as represented in German...

The writer and intellectual Lou Andreas-Salome (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...

The first book to examine Goethe's writings on the daemonic in relation to both Classical philosophy and German Idealism. For Plato, the daemonic is a sensibility that brings individuals into contact with divine knowledge; Socrates was also inspired...

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...

The plays and prose works of the German writer, director, and political activist Peter Weiss (1916-1982) were immensely influential in the shaping of European Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century. Combining exploratory aesthetic openness...

The cultural history of 20th-century Germany, more perhaps than that of any other European country, was decisively influenced by political forces and developments. This volume of essays focuses on the relationship between German politics and culture,...

Heinrich Mann, once counted among the most important literary figures in Germany, is known to most English-speaking readers only as the brother of Thomas Mann, or in connection with Marlene Dietrich and the film "The Blue Angel," which was...

The first collection of essays in the new field of Asian-German Studies, Imagining Germany Imagining Asia demonstrates that Germany and Asia have always shared cultural spaces. Indeed, since the time of the German Enlightenment, Asia served as the foil...

The philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) -- in particular the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (pub. 1922) and the Philosophical Investigations (pub. 1953) -- was decisive for English-language 'analytic philosophy' in the post-war period. At the...

Is the picaro, the roguish hero of early modern Spanish adventure fiction, a "real man"? What position does he hold in the gender hierarchy of his fictional social context? Why is the picara so nonfemale? What effect has her gender constitution...

An alternative genealogy of abstract art, featuring the crucial role of 19th-century German literature in shaping it aesthetically, culturally, and socially. Once upon a time (or more specifically, in 1911!) there was an artist named Wassily...

This volume is a response to a renewed interest in narrative form in contemporary literary studies, taking up the question of literary narratives and their encounters with modernism and postmodernism within the German-language milieu. Original essays...