Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Series
  3. Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture

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.

Refine search

Refine search

Content type:
Publication date:
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

253 results in Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture

Page 11 of 13

Literature in Vienna at the Turn of the Centuries
  • Continuities and Discontinuities around 1900 and 2000
  • Edited by Ernst Grabovszki, James Hardin
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    13 December 2002
  • This book of new essays by widely-published scholars from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and Austria examines the artistic, social, political, and historical continuities and discontinuities in Viennese literature during the periods around 1900 and 2000. It takes its impetus from the idea that both turns of the century are turning points in the development of Austrian literature and history. The essays show that in both periods literature not only reflects societal conditions and political issues, but also serves to criticize them. Ernst Grabovszki's introduction sets the context of literature in Vienna in 1900 and 2000, and is followed by essays exploring the following topics bearing on the city's literature across the two periods: writing about Vienna (Janet Stewart); art and architecture (Douglas Crow); psychoanalysis and the literature of Vienna (Thomas Paul Bonfiglio); poetry in Vienna from Hofmannsthal to Jandl (Rüdiger Görner); Austrian cinema culture (Willy Riemer); Austrian-Jewish culture (Hillary Hope Herzog and Todd Herzog); Austrian women's writing (Dagmar C. G. Lorenz); Karl Kraus and Robert Menasse as critical observers of their times (Geoffrey C. Howes); and Venice as mediator between the Viennese metropolis and the provinces (John Pizer). The figures treated range from Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg, Franz Grillparzer, Joseph Roth, Bertha von Suttner, and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach in the earlier fin de siècle to Elfriede Jelinek, Robert Schindel, Robert Menasse, Josef Haslinger, Ernst Jandl, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and Marlene Streeruwitz in the current period. Ernst Grabovszki teaches at the University of Vienna. James Hardin is professor emeritus of German at the University of South Carolina.

The Burden of the Past
  • Martin Walser on Modern German Identity: Texts, Contexts, Commentary
  • Thomas A. Kovach, Martin Walser
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 November 2008
  • 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 community, attacked Walser for inciting dangerous right-wing sentiment with controversial passages including the notorious statement 'Auschwitz is not suited to be a moral bludgeon,' thus igniting the protracted public battle of opinions known as the 'Walser-Bubis Debate.' The speech continues to loom large in Germany's struggle to acknowledge responsibility for Nazi crimes yet escape a suffocating burden of remembrance. But in spite of its notoriety, little attention has been paid to what the speech actually says, as opposed to the public outcry and debate that followed it. This book presents the text of the speech, along with several of Walser's other essays and speeches about the Holocaust and its impact on German identity, in English translation. It examines them as texts, a process that involves a discussion of literary complexities and an attempt to distinguish valid criticism of German intellectual life from what is justifiably problematic. And it places this textual examination in the context of Walser's and other postwar German intellectuals' attempts to deal with the Nazi past, of German-Jewish relations in the postwar era, and of the once hidden and now - due in part to Walser's speech - increasingly open discourse about Germans as victims during and immediately after the Nazi era. Thomas A. Kovach is professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona.

Modern German Political Drama 1980–2000
  • Birgit Haas
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    15 October 2003
  • 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 surrounding the 'Wende', or reunification, of 1989. This book is the first comprehensive study of politically engaged German drama writing in the 1980s and 1990s, covering the works of key playwrights during the period and providing an analysis of oppositional theater before and after reunification. It treats the range of current political topics and their repercussions in drama writing, including reunification, women's issues, the media, politicized environmentalism and the Greens, and right-wing radicalism. In addition to established playwrights such as Heinar Kipphardt, Franz Xaver Kroetz, and Heiner Müller, the book looks at the younger generation of playwrights: writers such as Oliver Bukowski, Dea Loher, Marius von Mayenburg, Albert Ostermaier, and Theresia Walser. It gives an overview of recent German political drama through analysis of more than forty contemporary plays, clearly tracing connections between politics and theater. Each chapter is preceded by a short introduction into the respective political topic, providing the framework for the study of drama as a political tool and making it easy for students to see the multiple ways in which plays respond to political change. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in drama and theater studies and German literature. Birgit Haas teaches in the German Department at the University of Heidelberg.

Traumatic Verses
  • On Poetry in German from the Concentration Camps, 1933–1945
  • Andrés Nader
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 October 2007
  • Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Christianstadt, Dachau. The names of Nazi concentration camps evoke images of radical destitution. The atrocities we call the Holocaust defy comprehension, while thinkers continue to ponder the possibility of 'poetry after Auschwitz.' And yet a number of people composed poems while imprisoned in the camps. Unlike most documents about the camps, these poems are self-representations that convey the perspective of the inmates who wrote them. 'Traumatic Verses' provides psychoanalytically informed close readings of a range of poems and discusses their significance for aesthetic theory and for research on the camps. It also tells the stories behind the composition and preservation of these poems and the history of their publication since 1945. Most of the poems appear here for the first time in English translation along with the original texts. This book fills a gap left by literary historians, who have mostly ignored writings from the camps and avoided careful scrutiny of literature produced under the Nazi regime. Studies of trauma have concentrated on post-traumatic experiences; discussions of aesthetics 'after' the Holocaust have neglected the issue of the artistic impulse 'in' the camps. On both counts this book constitutes a unique contribution to scholarship, showing that, when read attentively, the poems written in the camps are invaluable sites for confronting the Nazi past. Andrés J. Nader is Project Manager at the Amadeu Antonio Foundation in Berlin, and lectures at the Humboldt University. Winner, 2008 Modern Language Association Book Prize for Independent Scholars; from the statement of the Selection Committee: Leading a new generation of students of the Holocaust, Nader persuasively analyzes the psychological needs and motivations behind ... poetry composed in the concentration camps. Displaying a strong command of trauma and pain theory, as well as the prior history of Holocaust studies, [Nader] illuminates the role of poetry in the camp inmates' reclamation of the German language and cultural heritage. Offering many poems in English for the first time, in elegant translation, Nader's anthology and commentary add a significant new dimension to Holocaust studies.

Recasting German Identity
  • Culture, Politics, and Literature in the Berlin Republic
  • Edited by Stuart Taberner, Frank Finlay
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    15 November 2002
  • This collection of fifteen essays by scholars from the UK, the US, Germany, and Scandinavia revisits the question of German identity. Unlike previous books on this topic, however, the focus is not exclusively on national identity in the aftermath of Hitler. Instead, the concentration is upon the plurality of ethnic, sexual, political, geographical, and cultural identities in modern Germany, and on their often fragmentary nature as the country struggles with the challenges of unification and international developments such as globalization, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. The multifaceted nature of German identity demands a variety of approaches: thus the essays are interdisciplinary, drawing upon historical, sociological, and literary sources. They are organized with reference to three distinct sections: Berlin, Political Formations, and Difference; yet at the same time they illuminate one another across the volume, offering a nuanced understanding of the complex question of identity in today's Germany. Topics include the new self-understanding of the Berlin Republic, Berlin as a public showcase, the Berlin architecture debate, the Walser-Bubis debate, fictions of German history and the end of the GDR, the impact of the German student movement on the FRG, Prime Minister Biedenkopf and the myth of Saxon identity, women in post-1989 Germany, trains as symbols and the function of the foreign in post-1989 fiction, identity construction among Turks in Germany and Turkish self-representation in post-1989 fiction, the state of German literature today. Contributors: Frank Brunssen, Ulrike Zitzlsperger Janet Stewart, Kathrin Schödel, Karen Leeder, Ingo Cornils, Peter Thompson, Chris Szejnmann, Sabine Lang, Simon Ward, Roswitha Skare, Eva Kolinsky, Margaret Littler, Katharina Gerstenberger, and Stuart Parkes. Stuart Taberner is Lecturer in German, and Frank Finlay is Professor of German and Head of the Department of German, both at the University of Leeds, UK.

Humor and Irony in Nineteenth-Century German Women's Writing
  • Studies in Prose Fiction, 1840–1900
  • Helen Chambers
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 June 2007
  • Nineteenth-century German literature is seldom seen as rich in humor and irony, and women's writing from that period is perhaps even less likely to be seen as possessing those qualities. Yet since comedy is bound to societal norms, and humor and irony are recognized weapons of the weak against authority, what this innovative study reveals should not be surprising: women writers found much to laugh at in a bourgeois age when social constraints, particularly on women, were tight. Helen Chambers analyzes prose fiction by leading female writers of the day who prominently employ humor and irony. Arguing that humor and irony involve cognitive and rational processes, she highlights the inadequacy of binary theories of gender that classify the female as emotional and the male as rational. Chambers focuses on nine women writers: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Ida Hahn-Hahn, Ottilie Wildermuth, Helene Böhlau, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Ada Christen, Clara Viebig, Isolde Kurz, and Ricarda Huch. She uncovers a rich seam of unsuspected or forgotten variety, identifies fresh avenues of approach, and suggests a range of works that merit a place on university reading lists and attention in scholarly studies. Helen Chambers is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK.

Günter Grass and his Critics
  • From 'The Tin Drum' to 'Crabwalk'
  • Siegfried Mews
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 March 2008
  • When the Swedish Academy announced that Günter Grass had been awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, it singled out his first novel 'The Tin Drum' (1959, English translation 1963) as a seminal work that had signaled the postwar rebirth of German letters, auguring 'a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction.' Nearly fifty years after its publication, the novel's significance has been generally acknowledged: it is the uncontested favorite among Grass's works of fiction on the part of reading public and critics alike, yet its canonical status tends to obscure the decidedly mixed and even hostile reactions it initially elicited. Along with 'The Tin Drum,' Grass's impressive body of literary work since the 1950s has spawned a cottage industry of Grass criticism, making a reliable guide through the thicket of sometimes contradictory readings a definite desideratum. Siegfried Mews fills this lacuna in Grass scholarship by way of a detailed but succinct, descriptive as well as analytical and evaluative overview of the scholarship from 1959 to 2005. Grass's politically motivated interventions in public discourse have kept him highly visible, blurring the boundaries between politics and aesthetics. Mews therefore examines not only academic criticism but also the daily and weekly press (and other news media), providing additional insight into the reception of Grass's works. Siegfried Mews is Professor of German at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Winner, CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award, 2008.

Novels of Turkish German Settlement
  • Cosmopolite Fictions
  • Tom Cheesman
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 November 2007
  • Germany has become home to some 2.5 million people of Turkish background since mass recruitments in the 1960s and 1970s to man the 'economic miracle.' An increasingly settled Turkish German population now asserts a permanent place in Germany: over a third were born there, and a third have German citizenship. At the same time, Turkish German writers have become integral to the German literary scene. They include bestselling novelists Renan Demirkan and Akif Pirinçci; prestigious literary prize-winners Emine Sevgi özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu; and the critically acclaimed Aras ören and Zafer Senocak. Tom Cheesman focuses on these and other writers' perspectives on cosmopolitan ideals and aspirations, ranging from glib affirmation to cynical transgression and melancholy nihilism. People of Turkish background are still not always recognized as equal participants in German life, but Turkish German writers' interventions defy marginalizing concepts such as 'literature of migration' or 'intercultural literature.' What Cheesman calls their 'literature of settlement' is paradigmatic for European cultures adapting to diversity and negotiating new identities. He shows German culture to have moved decisively beyond such "polite fictions" as the term 'guest worker' or the slogan 'not a country of immigration.' Tom Cheesman is Senior Lecturer in German at Swansea University, Wales.

The Intersection of Science and Literature in Musil's 'The Man Without Qualities'
  • Thomas Sebastian
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    14 February 2005
  • As the utopian projection of a world in which the conditional mood is preferred to the indicative, Robert Musil's ambitious novel 'The Man Without Qualities' is widely recognized as a great example of aesthetic modernism and a profound reflection on the 'postmodern condition.' Based on the new and more inclusive English translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike, this study provides the English-speaking reader with a well-researched commentary that situates Musil's novel in the cultural, literary, and scientific context of the early 20th century. Revealing the novel's many philosophical underpinnings, the study analyzes the intersection of theoretical reflection and aesthetic imagination essential to Musil's programmatic move beyond realism. Thomas Sebastian explores Musil's background in experimental psychology, which he studied under the pioneering psychologist Carl Stumpf, and how it and other strains of scientific thought, including that of Ernst Mach, on whose philosophical ideas Musil wrote his doctoral thesis, are reflected in his great novel. Thomas Sebastian is associate professor of German at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Mapping Morality in Postwar German Women's Fiction
  • Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Drewitz, and Grete Weil
  • Michelle Mattson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 August 2010
  • 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 negotiate their personal responsibilities based on those roles. These three are, of course, by no means the only German writers to have dealt with such questions in the wake of the Third Reich. But Wolf, Drewitz, and Weil ground their projects in the family, an institution often left out of such inquiries, giving them a different starting point for moral reflection. Before looking closely at the three writers' views of the individual's role and responsibility, the book devotes a chapter to the examination of individual and collective memory, then a chapter to how feminist ethicists view moral responsibility. Chapters on the three writers' literary approaches to the questions follow: Wolf enacts a process of historical and geographic triangulation; Drewitz constructs concentric historical and social circles; Weil seeks to repair the historical ruptures of the Holocaust, creating new historical narratives and exploring the limitations of traditional bourgeois morality. Each of the three attempts to map a geography of morals that begins within the structures of the extended family but interrogates individual responsibility in an increasingly globalized environment. Michelle Mattson is Associate Professor of German at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee.

The Indo-German Identification
  • Reconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies, 1765–1885
  • Robert Cowan
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 September 2010
  • In the early nineteenth century, German intellectuals such as Novalis, Schelling, and Friedrich Schlegel, convinced that Germany's cultural origins lay in ancient India, attempted to reconcile these origins with their imagined destiny as saviors of a degenerate Europe, then shifted from 'Indomania' to Indophobia when the attempt foundered. The philosophers Hegel, Schopenhauer, and, later, Nietzsche provided alternate views of the role of India in world history that would be disastrously misappropriated in the twentieth century. Reconstructing Hellenistic and humanist views of the ancient Brahmins and Goths, French-Enlightenment debates over the postdiluvian origins of the arts and sciences, and the Indophilia and protonationalism of Herder, Robert Cowan focuses on turning points in the development of an 'Indo-German' ideal, an ideal less focused on intellectual imperialism than many studies of the 'Aryan Myth' and Orientalism would have us believe. Cowan argues that the study of this ideal continues to offer lessons about cultural difference in the 'post-national' twenty-first century. Of great interest to historians, philosophers, and literary scholars, this cross-cultural study offers a new understanding of the Indo-German story by showing that attempts to establish identity necessarily involve a reconciliation of origins and destinies, of self and other, of individual and collective. Robert Cowan is Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York.

Hermann Broch, Visionary in Exile
  • The 2001 Yale Symposium
  • Edited by Paul Michael Lützeler, Matthias Konzett, Willy Riemer
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    03 March 2003
  • 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 Sleepwalkers', a trilogy of political and philosophical novels. His best-known work is 'The Death of Virgil', a long, challenging work in a lyrical, exuberant, and sometimes nearly incomprehensible style, a kind of cerebral stream-of-consciousness of the dying Virgil. Broch also wrote extensively about modern art and architecture, Hofmannsthal, and mass psychology. He has a special connection to Yale, as he lived the last years of his life there after having escaped Austria in 1938. The participants in the Yale Symposium of April 2001 are among the world's most prominent Broch scholars. Fourteen of their presentations have been extensively revised for this volume, which focuses on Broch as critic and as novelist and dramatist. Topics include Broch's views on kitsch and art, and on drama; his cultural criticism; his cooperation with Borgese and Arendt; his theory of mass psychology; history in his works, Ernst Kretschmer's influence on him; 'Virgil' and Celan's 'Atemwende'; Jean Starr Untermeyer's translation of 'Virgil'; guilt and the fall in 'Those without Guilt'; and Broch reception in Japan. PAUL MICHAEL LüTZELER is Distinguished University Professor of German at Washington University St. Louis and editor of Broch's collected works. MATTHIAS KONZETT is associate professor of German at Yale; WILLY RIEMER is associate professor of German at the University of Delaware, and CHRISTA SAMMONS is curator of the German collections of the Beinecke Library at Yale.

The Historical Experience in German Drama
  • From Gryphius to Brecht
  • Alan Menhennet
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    25 November 2002
  • In what is still the standard survey of German historical drama, 'Das deutsche Geschichtsdrama' (1952), Friedrich Sengle understands "historical drama" as that in which objective history is blended with an 'idea' that is the basis of its dramatic coherence and force. This idea inevitably becomes the engine of a dramatic action, inclining the theatergoer to become wholly engaged with dramatic characters in a dramatic present, rather than with 'real' figures in a historical past. Such plays (for instance Schiller's 'Maria Stuart') may remain broadly 'true to history,' but the 'experience' they afford is often not historical; that is, it may be emotionally and intellectually compelling, but it will not be historical in the sense of causing us, in our present, to become engaged with our relationship with past figures and events and their continued relevance for us. Alan Menhennet identifies and analyzes examples of German drama that are historical in the stricter sense: not only in terms of the provenance of the material, but also in that, while remaining dramatic in nature, they do convey a historical experience. By means of a critical survey extending from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, in the contexts of literary history, the philosophy of history, and German history from the Thirty Years' War to the Second World War, Menhennet provides a complement to Sengle's still-valuable study. Major figures treated include Gryphius, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Grillparzer, Hebbel, Schnitzler, and Brecht. There is no competing work in English. Alan Menhennet is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. He is author of 'Grimmelshausen the Storyteller' (Camden House, 1997).

Shifting Perspectives
  • East German Autobiographical Narratives before and after the End of the GDR
  • Dennis Tate
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 August 2007
  • A striking feature of today's German literature is the survival of an East German subculture characterized by its authors' self-reflexive concern with their own lives, not only in texts labeled as autobiography but also those in the more ambiguous territory of what Christa Wolf has called 'subjective authenticity.' Dennis Tate provides the first detailed account of this phenomenon: its origins in the 1930s' exile debates, its evolution during the GDR's lifespan, and its manifestations in the work of five East German authors still widely read today: Brigitte Reimann, Franz Fühmann, Stefan Heym, Günter de Bruyn, and Christa Wolf. Tate shows how the preoccupation with self arose from the unusually turbulent circumstances in which this generation has lived. Having succumbed early to the temptation to simplify their life stories for misguided educational purposes, these authors have repeatedly reconstructed their personal and political identities as their perspectives on the past have shifted. Tate shows the importance of viewing their autobiographical writing as a multilayered historical process, exposing problems with canonical accounts of East German literature and enabling texts published under GDR censorship to be properly appreciated for the first time. Dennis Tate is Professor of German Studies at the University of Bath, UK.

Writers and Politics in Germany, 1945–2008
  • Stuart Parkes
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    15 January 2009
  • George Orwell said that all writing is political; but the writers of some nations and some periods are more political than others. German writers after 1945 have exemplified such heightened politicization, and this book considers their contribution to the democratic development of Germany by looking principally at their directly political, non-fictional writings. It pays particular attention to writers and the student movement of the 1960s and '70s, when some proclaimed the death of literature and called for a turn to direct political action. Yet writers in both parts of Germany gradually came to identify with their respective states, even if the idea of one Germany never entirely disappeared. The unification of 1989-1990, in which this idea astonishingly became reality, posed a major (and some would say unmet) challenge to writers in both East and West. After looking at this period of intense political activities, the book considers the continuing East/West division and changing attitudes to the Nazi past, asking whether the intellectual climate has swung to the right. It also asks to what extent political involvement has been a generational project for the immediate postwar generation and is less important for younger writers who see the Federal Republic as a 'normal' democratic state. Stuart Parkes is Emeritus Professor of German from the University of Sunderland (UK).

German Novelists of the Weimar Republic
  • Intersections of Literature and Politics
  • Edited by Karl Leydecker
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 August 2006
  • The Weimar Republic was a turbulent and fateful time in German history. Characterized by economic and political instability, polarization, and radicalism, the period witnessed the efforts of many German writers to play a leading political role, whether directly, in the chaotic years of 1918-1919, or indirectly, through their works. The novelists chosen range from such now-canonical authors as Alfred Döblin, Hermann Hesse, and Heinrich Mann to bestselling writers of the time such as Erich Maria Remarque, B. Traven, Vicki Baum, and Hans Fallada. They also span the political spectrum, from the right-wing Ernst Jünger to pacifists such as Remarque. The journalistic engagement of Joseph Roth, otherwise well known as a novelist, and of the recently rediscovered writer Gabriele Tergit is also represented. Contributors: Paul Bishop, Roland Dollinger, Helen Chambers, Karin V. Gunnemann, David Midgley, Brian Murdoch, Fiona Sutton, Heather Valencia, Jenny Williams, Roger Woods. Karl Leydecker is Reader in German at the University of Kent.

Bertolt Brecht's Dramatic Theory
  • John J. White
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 December 2004
  • As an integral part of his work as a political playwright and dramaturge, Bertolt Brecht concerned himself extensively with the theory of drama. He was convinced that the Aristotelian ideal of audience catharsis through identification with a hero and the resultant experience of terror and pity worked against his goal of bettering society. He did not want his audiences to feel, but to think, and his main theoretical thrusts - 'Verfremdungseffekte' (de-familiarization devices) and epic theater, among others - were conceived in pursuit of this goal. This is the first detailed study in English of Brecht's writings on the theater to take account of works first made available in the recent German edition of his collected works. It offers in-depth analyses of Brecht's canonical essays on the theater from 1930 to the late 1940s and early GDR years. Close readings of the individual essays are supplemented by surveys of the changing connotations within Brecht's dramaturgical oeuvre of key theoretical terms, including epic and anti-Aristotelian theater, de-familiarization, historicization, and dialectical theater. Brecht's distinct contribution to the theorizing of acting and audience response is examined in detail, and each theoretical essay and concept is placed in the context of the aesthetic debates of the time, subjected to a critical assessment, and considered in light of subsequent scholarly thinking. In many cases, the playwright's theoretical discourse is shown to employ methods of 'epic' presentation and techniques of de-familiarization that are corollaries of the dramatic techniques for which his plays are justly famous. John J. White is Emeritus Professor of German and Comparative Literature at King's College London.

Imperial Messages
  • Orientalism as Self-Critique in the Habsburg 'Fin de Siècle'
  • Robert Lemon
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 June 2011
  • In recent years a debate has arisen on the applicability of postcolonial theory to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some have argued that Austria-Hungary's lack of overseas territories renders the concepts of colonialism and postcolonialism irrelevant, while others have cited the quasi-colonial attitudes of the Viennese elite towards the various 'subject peoples' of the empire as a point of comparison. 'Imperial Messages' applies postcolonial theory to works of orientalist fiction by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, and Franz Kafka, all subjects of the empire, challenging Edward Said's notion that orientalism invariably acts in the ideological service of European colonialism. It argues that these Habsburg authors employ oriental motifs not to promulgate Western hegemony, but to engage in self-reflection and self-critique, including critique of the foundational concepts of orientalist discourse itself. By providing detailed textual analyses of canonical works of Austrian Modernism, including Hofmannsthal's 'Tale of the 672nd Night,' Musil's 'Young Törless,' and Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony,' the book not only offers new postcolonial readings of these Austrian works, but also shows how they question the conventional postcolonial and post-Saidian view of orientalism as a purely hegemonic discourse. Robert Lemon is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Oklahoma.

Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Culture
  • Textscapes, Filmscapes, Soundscapes
  • Maria Stehle
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 November 2012
  • Accounts of how Germany has changed since unification often portray the Berlin Republic as a new Germany that has left the Nazi past and Cold War division behind and entered the new millennium as a peaceful, worldly, and cautiously proud nation. Closer inspection, however, reveals tensions between such views and the realities of a country that continues to struggle with racism, provincialism, and fear of the perceived Other. Mainstream media foster such fears by describing violence in ghetto schools, failed integration, and the loss of society's core values. The city emerges as a key site not only of ethnic and political tension but of social change. Maria Stehle illuminates these tensions and transformations by following the metaphor of the ghetto in literary works from the 1990s by Feridun Zaimoglu, in German ghettocentric films from the late 1990s and the early twenty-first century, and in hip-hop and rap music of the same periods. In their representations of ghettos, authors, filmmakers, musicians, and performers redefine and challenge provincialism and nationalism and employ transcultural frameworks for their diverging political agendas. By contextualizing these discussions within social and political developments, this study illuminates the complexities that define Germany today for scholars and students across the disciplines of German, European, cultural, urban, and media studies. Maria Stehle is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Metamimesis
  • Imitation in Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre' and Early German Romanticism
  • Mattias Pirholt
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 November 2012
  • Mimesis, or the imitation of nature, is one of the most important concepts in eighteenth-century German literary aesthetics. As the century progressed, classical mimeticism came increasingly under attack, though it also held its position in the works of Goethe, Schiller, and Moritz. Much recent scholarship construes Early German Romanticism's refutation of mimeticism as its single distinguishing trait: the Romantics' conception of art as the very negation of the ideal of imitation. In this view, the Romantics saw art as production ('poiesis'): imaginative, musical, transcendent. Mattias Pirholt's book not only problematizes this view of Romanticism, but also shows that reflections on mimesis are foundational for the German Romantic novel, as is Goethe's great pre-Romantic novel 'Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship'. Among the novels examined are Friedrich Schlegel's 'Lucinde', shown to be transgressive in its use of the aesthetics of imitation; Novalis's 'Heinrich von Ofterdingen', interpreted as an attempt to construct the novel as a self-imitating world; and Clemens Brentano's 'Godwi', seen to signal the end of Early Romanticism, both fulfilling and ironically deconstructing the self-reflective mimeticism of the novels that came before it. Mattias Pirholt is a Research Fellow in the Department of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Page 11 of 13