German

"Transnationalism" has become a key term in debates in the social sciences and humanities, reflecting concern with today's unprecedented flows of commodities, fashions, ideas, and people across national borders. Forced and unforced mobility,...

In Germany the decade beginning in the mid-1990s brought an unprecedented "confusion of the spheres" of literature and popular music. Popular musicians "crossed over" into the literary field, editors and writers called for...

A comprehensive account of Goethe's relationship to Arabian culture, mediated by his interest in certain poets and texts and by his highly nuanced attitude toward Islam. Abundant evidence bears witness to Johann Wolfgang Goethe's lifelong predilection...

There has been an "ethical turn" in the literature, culture, and theory of recent years. Questions of morality are urgent at a time of increasing global insecurities. Yet it is becoming ever more difficult to make ethical judgments in...

The first book in English on the German Gothic in over thirty years, consisting of new essays investigating the internationality of the Gothic mode. The literary mode of the Gothic is well established in English Studies, and there is growing interest...

The Age of Goethe is widely viewed as the apogee of German culture. Its writers and thinkers, especially Goethe, have been exalted as role models for life and art, particularly after 1945. Yet in the 1970s, a new generation of German writers in both East...

The first major study of the contemporary German debate over "normalization" and its impact across the range of cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and historical discourses. This volume features sixteen thought-provoking essays by renowned...

Critics have paid increasing attention to the oeuvre of Luise Gottsched (1713-62), Germany's first prominent woman of letters, but have neglected her lifelong work of translation, which encompassed over fifty volumes and an extraordinary range, from...

Key topics in important German medieval work surveyed and reassessed. Few works of the middle ages can boast the `staying power' of the 'heroic' Nibelungenlied and few have generated more controversy both among scholars and the educated public. The...

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,...

Established, commissioned, and edited by the Department of German at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh German Yearbook encourages and disseminates lively and open discussion of themes pertinent to German Studies. No other yearbook covers the entire...

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,...

The German novelist Martin Walser's 1998 speech upon accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade remains a milestone in recent German efforts to come to terms with the Nazi past. The day after the speech, Ignatz Bubis, leader of Germany's Jewish...

The success of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners(1997) and the heated debates that followed its publication exposed once again Germany's long tradition of anti-Semitism as a major cause of the Holocaust. Goldhagen, like many before him,...

This volume of essays examines the perceived rift between the British and German intellectual and cultural traditions before 1914 and how the resultant war of words both reflects and helped determine historical, political, and, ultimately, military...

New and insightful interpretations of the controversial stories of Heinrich von Kleist. The fascinating and controversial German writer of dramas and novellas Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) is one of the most interesting objects of analysis for...

While sociologists have long agreed that the problems of modern and contemporary subjectivity crystallize in the issue of romantic relationships and love (e.g., Luhmann, Illouz, Beck, etc.), the theme of love, so crucial to the foundational text of...

Marc Redfield maintains that the literary genre of the Bildungsroman brings into sharp focus the contradictions of aesthetics, and also that aesthetics exemplifies what is called ideology. He combines a wide-ranging account of the history and theory of...

Sometimes our feelings are so big, our dreams and our worries so wide, that we can't find the words to express them. How MUCH love we feel; what a new sibling will bring; exactly what it's like to take a hard tumble, or to want the sun to shine on a...

Encounters with Paul Celan's Poetry: The Other's Time consists of encounters: with poetry, with its readers, and with the other that poetry seeks to encounter. What does it mean, when Celan insists that every real encounter, every true encounter happens...

Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. The Geological Unconscious...

Overview of the critical history of the German novella. Originating with Boccaccio during the Italian Renaissance, the novella, a cyclical collection of frame stories in prose, quickly inspired many imitations in Italy, France, Spain and Great Britain...

Employs an innovative approach by "stages" to offer a unified vision of European Romanticism over the half-century of its growth and decline. Romanticism was a truly European phenomenon, extending roughly from the French Revolution to the 1848...

Edited volume tracing the development of a new generation of German Jewish writers, offering fresh interpretations of individual works, and probing the very concept of "German Jewish literature." The 1990 reunification of Germany gave rise to a...

1932, the eve of the Nazi seizure of power: Germany beset with street violence, hunger, anti-Semitism, and despair; civil war threatens. The "typical" Deutsch family fights to survive. The story begins with Pitt Deutsch, inventor and self-made...

A collection of new essays treating the most important aspects of the work of the most famous late Romantic, Heinrich Heine. As the most prominent German-Jewish Romantic writer, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) became a focal point for much of the tension...

Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (ca. 1621-1676) is the most significant (and still readable) author of seventeenth-century German novels. His Abenteuerlicher Simplicius Simplicissimus remains the one German novel of its time that has attained...

The legend of Tristan and Isolde -- the archetypal narrative about the turbulent effects of all-consuming, passionate love -- achieved its most complete and profound rendering in the German poet Gottfried von Strassburg's verse romance Tristan (ca...

One of the most influential German-language writers of the late twentieth century, Max Frisch (1911-1991) not only has canonical status in Europe, but has also been well received in the English-speaking world. English translations of his works are...

The last two decades of the 20th century gave rise to a renaissance in the genre of the political drama in Germany. Although political drama has always been a mainstay of German literature, it has been of particular significance during the years...

The Austrian novelist Hermann Broch ranks with Kafka and Musil among the three greatest 20th-century Austrian novelists and belongs to the century's most gifted novelists in German from whatever country. He established his reputation with The...

The Enlightenment was based on the use of reason, common sense, and "natural law," and was paralleled by an emphasis on feelings and the emotions in religious, especially Pietist circles. Progressive thinkers in England, France, and later in...

Alfred Doeblin (1878-1957) is one of the major German writers of the twentieth century. His experimental, ever-changing, avant-garde style kept both readers and critics off guard, and although he won the acclaim of critics and had a clear impact on...

In German Studies the literary phenomenon of melancholy, which has a longstanding and diverse history in European letters, has typically been associated with the Early Modern and Baroque periods, Romanticism, and the crisis of modernity. This...

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 --...

King Rother, a twelfth-century bridal-quest epic, occupies an important place in the history of German literature. The earliest surviving and structurally most sophisticated of the so-called minstrel epics, verse narratives once assumed to have been...

Warlike women are a recurring phenomenon in German literature and culture since 1500. Amazons, terrorists, warrior women -- this volume of essays by leading scholars from the UK and Germany analyzes ideas and portrayals of these figures in the visual...

Pathbreaking examination of the prominent 19th-c. motif with an eye toward literature as social commentary. The wanderer is an indispensable part of the German cultural imaginary. The nineteenth-century prominence of the motif owes much to the...

Three late prose works of the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), published between 1983 and 1985, display a number of interesting similarities and intertextual references in form and content. They are considered here as a...

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is one of the great names of the classical age of German literature. One of the last universalists, he wrote on aesthetics, literary history and theory, historiography, anthropology, psychology, education, and...