Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Text and Its Context
This Festschrift for Ronald Speirs, Professor of German at the University of Birmingham, contains twenty-four original essays by scholars from Great Britain, Germany, Austria, and Norway. Between them they encompass the entire modern period from the later eighteenth century onwards, and focus on a wide range of German-speaking environments. Several essays throw new light on authors to whom Professor Speirs himself has devoted particular attention (such as Brecht, Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, and Fontane), whilst others discuss writers such as Lenz, Büchner, Böhlau, C. F. Meyer, Keyserling, Jahnn, and Huch. Above all, however, the contributions address the complexities of writing in ideologically diverse contexts, including the Third Reich and the former German Democratic Republic. This interplay between text and context is the cornerstone which links all the essays, as it has consistently informed Ronald Speirs's own work - which combines a scrupulous attention to textual detail with an acute awareness of the socio-political milieux and philosophical influences that shape creative literature.
Field Studies
The fifteen essays in this volume reflect the diversity of German studies in Britain and Ireland today. The German language itself is the focus of four studies, covering historical aspects of German and Yiddish, language pedagogy and controversial contemporary issues, such as the rise of Anglicisms in German and the language of second- and third-generation immigrants. Traditional literary philology is also well represented in six essays on prose writers and dramatists from the nineteenth century to the present day, but it is a traditional philology that has been much modified and enriched by the cultural and historical perspectives evident in the remaining five essays. These include psychoanalytical and contextual studies and embrace the historical development and elaboration of mass media technologies from radio to public-access cable TV.
Inspiration Bonaparte?
"In the Beginning was Napoleon"--"Napoleon and no end" Inspiration Bonaparte explores German responses to Bonaparte in literature, philosophy, painting, science, education, music, and film from his rise to the present. Two hundred years after his death, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) continues to resonate as a fascinating, ambivalent, and polarizing figure. Differences of opinion as to whether Bonaparte should be viewed as the executor of the principles of the French Revolution or as the figure who was principally responsible for their corruption are as pronounced today as they were at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Contributing to what had been an uneasy German relationship with t...
Lessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch XLIX, 2022
Das Lessing Yearbook, offizielles Organ der Lessing Society mit Sitz in Cincinnati, Ohio, ist ein weltweit anerkanntes, wichtiges Forum für alle Wissenschaftler, die sich – in englischer und deutscher Sprache – mit Literatur, Kultur und Gedankengut Deutschlands im 18. Jahrhundert beschäftigen. Guy Stern zum 100. Geburtstag. Mit Beiträgen von Tilman Venzl zum Manuskript und zur Dramaturgie der Minna von Barnhelm; Susan Morrow über Bilder und Illusionen in Lessings Laokoon; Joseph Haydt über Ironie und Wahrheit in Lessings theologischen Schriften; Till Kinzel über Jaspers und Lessing; Katherine Goodman über Luise Gottscheds Panthea und die Freidenker; Gabriel Cooper über anti-jüdische Stereotype im 18. Jahrhundert; Stefanie Stockhorst und Sotirios Agrofylax über Zeitschriften als aufklärerische Praxis; Hamilton Beck zur Rezeption Hippels im 19. Jahrhundert, und ein Forum zu Intersektionalität und Aufklärungsforschung.
A Stage for Debate
A Stage for Debate presents a detailed analysis of the repertoire of the leading German-language stage of the nineteenth century, Vienna’s Burgtheater. The book explores the extent to which the Burgtheater repertoire contributed to important political and cultural debates on individual liberty, the role of women in society, and the understanding of national and regional identity. The relevance of the Burgtheater as a forum for political debate is assessed not by the degree to which the performed plays transgressed established norms, but by the range of positions that were voiced on a given topic. Martin Wagner investigates the roughly 1,000 plays from across Europe that were introduced to the Burgtheater’s repertoire between 1814 and 1867 by combining a general overview with detailed interpretations of especially successful plays. Wagner reveals that the Burgtheater was significantly more involved in contemporary debates than the stereotype of this stage as an artistically refined but apolitical institution suggests. Drawing from theatre studies and German and Austrian studies more broadly, A Stage for Debate revises the history of one of Europe’s leading theatres.
Heinrich Von Kleist and Modernity (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture)
New essays employing a multitude of approaches to the works of Kleist, in the process shedding light on our present modernity. Modernity, according to some views, poses the problem of homo politicus -- the problem of how to act in a moral universe without a "master narrative," without a final foundation. From this angle, the oeuvre of Heinrich vonKleist -- novellas, dramas, and essays -- addresses problems emerging from a new universe of Kantian provenance, in many ways the same universe we inhabit today. This volume of new essays investigates Kleist's position in ourever-changing conception of modernity, employing aesthetic, narrative, philosophical, biographical, political, economic, anthr...
Un-Civilizing Processes?
The collapse of the supposedly ‘civilized’ German nation into the ‘barbarism’ of Hitler’s Third Reich has cast a long shadow over interpretations of German culture and society. In the remarkable work of Norbert Elias, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, a deep concern with the distinctiveness of ‘the Germans’ is linked with an ambitious attempt to work out more general relations between broad historical processes – patterns of state formation, changing social structures – and the character of the individual self, as evidenced in changing thresholds of shame and embarrassment. In critical engagement with Elias’s notion of the ‘civilizing process’, the essays collected...
Heinrich von Kleist
The works and biography of Heinrich von Kleist have fascinated authors, artists, and philosophers for centuries, and his enduring relevance is evident in the emblematic role he has played for generations. Kleist’s prose works remain “utterly unique” seventy years after Thomas Mann described their singular appeal, his dramas remain “disturbingly current” four decades after E.L. Doctorow characterized their modernity, and twenty-first century readers need not read far before finding the unresolved questions of the current century in Kleist. Heinrich von Kleist: Artistic and Aesthetic Legacies explores examples of Kleist’s impact on artistic creations and aesthetic theory spanning over two centuries of seismic metaphysical crises and nightmare scenarios from Europe to Mexico to Japan to manifestations of the American Dream.
Selected Works
First representative English collection of the Sturm und Drang writer Lenz, suited for the classroom and anyone interested in German literature, the European Enlightenment, or the theory and practice of theater. Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792) is, after Goethe, the most important writer of the German Sturm und Drang. Crucial in the reinvention of German literature through the reception of Shakespeare, his works contain a scathing critique of the ethical, political, and sexual regimes then prevailing in German and Eastern European territories. Both aesthetically and politically, Lenz strongly influenced later German writers - most notably Georg Büchner and Bertolt Brecht. In Germany,...
Private Lives and Collective Destinies
Nineteenth-century Germany witnessed many debates on the nature of the nation, both before and after unification in 1871. Bourgeois authors engaged closely with questions of class and national identity, and resourcefully sought to influence the collective destiny of the German people through works of popular fiction and cultural history. Typical of this trend was the realist writer Gustav Freytag (1816-1895), the most widely read novelist of his era. Innovatively exploring all of Freytag's works (poetry, drama, novels, history, journalism, biography and literary theory), Schofield examines how his popular writing systematically re-imagined the social structures of German society, embedding political agendas within contemporary stories of private lives. Connecting the aesthetics of Realism with the political aims of the bourgeoisie, the study both reassesses Freytag's position within the German literary canon and re-evaluates received opinion on the socio-political function of Realism in German culture. Benedict Schofield is Lecturer in German at King's College London.
