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A collection of fresh essays examining the wide scope and significance of early Germanic culture and literature. The first volume of this set views the development of writing in German with respect to broad aspects of the early Germanic past, drawing on a range of disciplines including archaeology, anthropology, and philology in addition toliterary history. The first part considers the whole concept of Germanic antiquity and the way in which it has been approached, examines classical writings about Germanic origins and the earliest Germanic tribes, and looks at thetwo great influences on the early Germanic world: the confrontation with the Roman Empire and the displacement of Germanic religi...
This is not a history of German literature. It is a study of the concept of honor as expressed in German literature, and it selects and treats literary works only in relation to the light they throw upon this subject. Therefore the discriminating reader must not be offended if many important works are neglected and less important ones are discussed, or if Sudermann is cited more than Goethe. Also, original verse is quoted as prose, although nothing is more prosaic than a literal prose translation of rimed verse. It is hoped that non-Germanists will not be prejudiced against German literature by these matter-of-fact samples. -- Preface.
Working across established disciplines & methodological divides, these essays investigate the ways in which texts, artists, & performers in all kinds of media have utilized sound materials in order to enforce or complicate dominant notions of German cultural & national identity.
Medieval German Literature provides a comprehensive survey of this Germanic body of work from the eighth century through the early fifteenth century. The authors treat the large body of late-medieval lyric poetry in detail for the first time.
Knowledge of German literature is frequently based on the hundreds of general histories of German literature that have been published since the genre first appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In A History of Histories of German Literature Michael Batts attempts to describe the various forms which these histories took between 1835 and 1914, not only in Germany but in other countries, and show how these forms developed.
Between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, poverty reached new extremes in Germany, as in other European countries, and gave rise to a class of disaffected poor, leading to the widespread expectation of a social revolution. Whether welcomed or feared, it dominated private and public debate to a larger extent than is generally assumed as is shown in this study on the reflections in literature of what was called the "Social Question." Examining works by Heine, Eichendorff, Nestroy, Büchner, Grillparzer, and Theodor Storm, the author reveals an acute awareness of political issues in an era in literature which is often seen as tending to quiescence and withdrawal from public preoccupations.
Germanic - one of the largest sub-groups of the Indo-European language family - comprises 37 languages with an estimated 470 million speakers worldwide. This book presents a comparative linguistic survey of the full range of Germanic languages, both ancient and modern, including major world languages such as English and German (West Germanic), the Scandinavian (North Germanic) languages, and the extinct East Germanic languages. Unlike previous studies, it does not take a chronological or a language-by-language approach, organized instead around linguistic constructions and subsystems. Considering dialects alongside standard varieties, it provides a detailed account of topics such as case, word formation, sound systems, vowel length, syllable structure, the noun phrase, the verb phrase, the expression of tense and mood, and the syntax of the clause. Authoritative and comprehensive, this much-needed survey will be welcomed by scholars and students of the Germanic languages, as well as linguists across the many branches of the field.
History, archaeology, and human evolutionary genetics provide us with an increasingly detailed view of the origins and development of the peoples that live in Northwestern Europe. This book aims to restore the key position of historical linguistics in this debate by treating the history of the Germanic languages as a history of its speakers. It focuses on the role that language contact has played in creating the Germanic languages, between the first millennium BC and the crucially important early medieval period. Chapters on the origins of English, German, Dutch, and the Germanic language family as a whole illustrate how the history of the sounds of these languages provide a key that unlocks the secret of their genesis: speakers of Latin, Celtic and Balto-Finnic switched to speaking Germanic and in the process introduced a 'foreign accent' that caught on and spread at the expense of types of Germanic that were not affected by foreign influence. The book is aimed at linguists, historians, archaeologists and anyone who is interested in what languages can tell us about the origins of their speakers.