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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.
In this study of the criticism of the most idiosyncratic voice of the German Sturm und Drang, the authors try to explain why critics have so often failed to come to terms with Lenz's refusal to encourage the middle class and to cater to its tastes. While many of the first reviewers found Lenz's work liberating, after his death the consensus of critics - when they gave him any attention at all - was that his works were second-rate or worse, and Goethe's negative comments were often used to support this verdict. This volume traces Lenz's reception from the earliest reviews through to New Criticism, Lenz's "rediscovery," and the changes in focus after the 1992 Lenz bicentennial.
After much investigation, Ziolkowski reinforces Umberto Eco's notion that the most powerful secret, the magnetic center of conspiracy fiction, is in fact "a secret without content."
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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,...
‘The Voice of the People’ presents a series of essays on literary aspects of the European folk revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and focuses on two key practices of antiquarianism: the role that collecting and editing played in the formation of ethnological study in the European academy; and the business of publishing and editing, which produced many ‘folkloric’ texts of dubious authenticity. The volume also presents new readings of various genres, including the epic, song, tale and novel, and contributes to the study of several crucial European literary figures. Above all, it investigates the great anonymous authors of the European folk tradition – in narrative and lyric art – and their relation to the cultural movements and imagined identities of the peoples of the emerging nineteenth-century European nation.
Scholarly Editing and German Literature: Revision, Revaluation, Edition offers international perspectives on the process, products and impacts of a commonly overlooked aspect of literary scholarship – scholarly editing contributions range from medieval to contemporary, correspondence to poetry, their forms from reports on works in progress to theoretical considerations. Bodo Plachta's observation that schools of scholarly editing in North America and Europe share a common origin and a basic set of common premises opens the volume and serves as an introduction to the five thematic groups: Material and Extralinguistic Elements and the Construction of Meaning, The Process of Editing and Editing Process, Edition and Commentary, Editing and Similar Second-Order Processes and Textual Creation, Edition and Canon(ization). Contributors: Peter Baltes, Kenneth Fockele, Nikolas Immer, Lydia Jones, Melanie Kage, Monika Lemmel, Claudia Liebrand, Ulrike Leuschner, Elizabeth Nijdam, Nina Nowakowski, Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth, Gaby Pailer, Bodo Plachta, Jeremy Redlich, Annika Rockenberger, Catherine Karen Roy, Per Röcken, Johannes Traulsen, and Thomas Wortmann.
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.
This monograph details Gutzkow's recurring use of performance-within-the-play as a means of encouraging an active, political response by the audience. He incorporates an internal audience viewing a performance on stage in order to model an ideal of dramatic reception for the audiences of his own play. Gutzkow structures the narrative contextualization of these performances as reflections of specific issues in the German states of the Vormärz. Beginning with an overview of theoretical and literary texts from the 1830s, this study traces Gutzkow's transferral of self-reflexive structures from his novels of this decade into his first staged play, Richard Savage (1839), and on through Das Urbil...