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In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar. German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry, yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers ...
This book investigates the contested ways in which eighteenth-century German philosophers, scientists, poets, and dramatists perceived and represented China and Africa from 1680 to 1830. Tautz demonstrates in compelling ways that reading China allowed for the integration of cultural difference into Enlightenment universalism, whereas seeing Africa exposed irreducible differences that undermined any claims of universality. By working through the case of eighteenth-century Germany and Europe, the book adds an important cross-cultural and historical dimension to questions relevant to our world today.
Inhalt: Birgit TAUTZ: Introduction: Color and Ethnic Difference or Ways of Seeing Part I: 1800 Gudrun HENTGES: Die Erfindung der 'Rasse' um 1800 - Klima, Säfte und Phlogiston in de Rassentheorie Immanuel Kants Wendy SUTHERLAND: Black Skin, White Skin and the Aesthetics of the Female Body in: Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler's Die Mohrinn Daniel PURDY: The Whiteness of Beauty: Weimar Neo-Classicism and the Sculptural Transcendence of Color Assenka OKSILOFF: The Eye of the Ethnographer: Adalbert von Chamisso's Voyage Around the World Part II: 1900 Thomas R. MILLER: Seeing Eyes, Reading Bodies: Visuality, Race and Color Perception or a Threshold in the History of Human Sciences Andreas MICHEL: "...
This volume plays on the double meaning of network in German and European Studies: configurations of people, objects, and texts as well as network analysis, the dominant Digital Humanities (DH) method featured in the book. Contributions from art history, history of the book, history, literary studies, and musicology contemplate the strengths and weakness of treating the period 1789-1810 as either continuous with or a departure from the centuries before and after by examining different facets of the longer period 1760-1830. While many chapters investigate German material, nearly all expand into other European cultures and cover important regions, protagonists, objects and constellations of bi...
The essays in this volume discuss the overlap between philosophical, aesthetic, and political concerns in the 1790s either in the work of individuals or in the transfer of cultural materials across national borders, which tended to entail adaptation and transformation. What emerges is a clearer understanding of the “fate” of the Enlightenment, its radicalization and its “overcoming” in aesthetic and political terms, and of the way in which political “paranoia”, generated by the fear of a spreading revolutionary radicalism, facilitated and influenced the cultural transfer of the “radical”. The collection will be of interest to scholars in French, German, English, and comparative studies working on the later 18th century or early 19th century. It is of particular interest to those working on the impact of the French Revolution, those engaged in reception studies, and those researching the interface between political and cultural activites. It is also of key interest to intellectual historians of this period, as well as general historians with an interest in modern conservatism and radicalism.
A collection of new essays bringing into view the push and pull of the national and the international in the German-language cultural field of the period. The cultural formations of the so-called Age of Nationalism (1848-1919) have shaped German-language literary studies to the present day, for better or worse. Literary histories, German self-representations, the view from abroad - all of these perspectives offer images of a culture ever more concerned with formulating a coherent, nationally focused idea of its origins, history, and cultural community. But even in this historical moment the German-speaking territories were not culturally self-contained; international forces always played a s...
Since the beginning of commodity culture, products have been marketed with images reflecting racist concepts of otherness. Using the prominent examples of three companies - Uncle Ben's, Sarotti, and Banania - this book examines how racist trademark figures were established in the U.S., Germany, and France, and built on nation-specific processes of racial stereotyping. While it finds that the three figures mirror their national histories of slavery, Orientalism, and colonialism, the book reveals that their paths through popular culture also followed strikingly similar patterns. Conceived in an era of overt racism, each symbol was challenged by social movements over the course of the 20th century and became increasingly marginalized in promotional activities. In the early 2000s, however, all three figures were relaunched with supposedly new makeovers, hitting once again at the heart of commodity culture and illustrating the subtle prevalence of racist stereotypes. (Series: Racism Analysis - Series A: Studies - Vol. 3)
The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans' perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany's protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.
A history of Germans’ attempts to transform society through art in an age of revolution. For German philosophers at the turn of the nineteenth century, beautiful works of art acted as beacons of freedom, instruments of progress that could model and stimulate the moral autonomy of their beholders. Amid the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Germans struggled to uphold these ideals as they contended with the destruction of art collections, looting, and questions about cultural property. As artworks fell prey to the violence they were supposed to transcend, some began to wonder how art could deliver liberation if it could also quickly become a spoil of war. Alice Goff considers a variety of works—including forty porphyry columns from the tomb of Charlemagne, the Quadriga from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the Laocoön group from Rome, a medieval bronze reliquary from Goslar, a Last Judgment from Danzig, and the mummified body of an official from the Rhenish hamlet of Sinzig—following the conflicts over the ownership, interpretation, conservation, and exhibition of German collections during the Napoleonic period and its aftermath.
Women in German Yearbook is a refereed publication that presents a wide range of feminist approaches to all aspects of German literature, culture, and language, including pedagogy. Reflecting the interdisciplinary perspectives that inform feminist German studies, each issue contains critical studies that employ gender and other analytical categories to examine the work, history, life, literature, and arts of the German-speaking world.Marjorie Gelus is a professor of German at California State University at Sacramento. Helga W. Kraft is a professor of Germanic studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.