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This work provides a history of Jewish writing and thought in the German-speaking world. Written by 118 scholars in the field, the book is arranged chronologically, moving from the 11th century to the present. Throughout, it depicts the contribution that Jewish writers have made to German culture and at the same time explores what it means to the other within that mainstream culture.
Letters have long been an outlet for political expression, whether they articulate the personal politics of the daily routine or the political views of individuals who witness or participate in dramatic events. In addition, letters can be unusually revealing records of the relations between men and women. Though letters have frequently been studied as a privileged space for literary, social, and cultural expression, the three-dimensional relationship of politics, gender, and letters has not been the focus of an entire volume. The nineteen essays in this collection examine how the gendered nature of political literacy is revealed over a 250-year period through letter writing, whether the writer is famous or unknown, the wife of a prominent politician or activist, a political prisoner or political militant. Ranging wide in terms of subject matter and geography, the contributors examine correspondence that ponders familial concerns, as well as letters providing political commentary on the effects of war or revolution on everyday life. Among the impressive group of international scholars are Jim Allen, Clare Brant, Edith Gelles, Jane Rendall, and Siân Reynolds.
German-Americans make up one of the largest ethnic groups in the United States, yet their very success at assimilating has also made them one of the least visible. Contented among Strangers examines the central role German-speaking women in rural areas of the Midwest played in preserving their ethnic and cultural identity. Even while living far from their original homelands, these women applied traditional European patterns of rural family life and values to their new homes in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. As a result they were more content with their modest lives than were their Anglo-American counterparts. Through personal recollections--including interesting diary material translated by the author, church and community documents, and migration and census data--Pickle reveals the diversity and richness of the women's experiences.
As one of the most widely read German authors of the nineteenth century, Gustav Freytag (1816-1895) continues to be associated with the middle class and the progress it enjoyed. Yet while his best-selling novel Soll und Haben (1855) and its lesser-known successor Die verlorene Handschrift (1864) owed their vast commercial success largely to their buoyant message of bourgeois advancement, they simultaneously devote significant attention to elements of traditional German society. In exploring Freytag's dual roles as both a novelist of contemporary middle-class life and a cultural historian, this book uncovers the author's divergent - and ostensibly conflicting - desire both to embrace progress...
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.
The articles in this collection originated from an international symposium at the University of Haifa and centre around a major topic in German, European and American literature, i.e. the way in which Jewish self-definition, both positive and negative, has materialized as a product of the tensions between secular culture and society on the one hand, and Jewish tradition and religion on the other. The broad range of authors (most of them of German-speaking origin) necessarily results in an almost equally broad range of answers to this central question. The volume is dedicated to the memory of the Israeli literary scholar Chaim Shoham.
Heinrich von Kleist's problematic relationship with the philosophy and the aesthetics of idealism informs his parodic, rebellious, and destructive oeuvre. This book focuses on this relationship and examines Kleist's female leading characters and their role as amorphous ciphers for his own subversive aesthetic theory. Through parody these characters call into question idealist philosophy regarding truth, knowledge, and gender, and offer a theory of aesthetic representation that replaces traditional binary oppositions with pluralities and nonclosure. Nietzsche may have opened the door to postmodernism; however, Kleist unlocked it with four cunning female voices. This is the first book in Kleist scholarship to focus solely on Kleist's female leading figures and their symbolic role as both character and literary theory - a theory anticipating Derridean deconstruction.
"Die Arbeit entwirft ein Mehrebenenmodell kommunikativer Gattungen, das universalistische, soziale und historische Aspekte unterscheidet. Damit wird eine medientheoretische Ausweitung der traditionellen literaturwissenschaftlichen Gattungstheorie und ein genuines Modell der Historizität literarisch-künstlerischer Gattungen vorgeschlagen. Exemplarisch durchgeführt wird dies am Beispiel der europäischen Geschichte des Sonetts von dessen mittelalterlicher 'Erfindung' am Hof Kaiser Friedrichs II. bis zum romantisch-modernen Sonettmodell August Wilhelm Schlegels. Die 'gattungstopische' Darstellung zielt auf eine grundlegende Historisierung des Gattungsmodells. Neue Thesen zur Sonettentstehung und zur historischen Vielfalt der Gattung pluralisieren das überkommene Bild der Sonettform."--Back cover.
Prismatic Thought is a brilliant tour of Adorno's work, with special emphasis on his aesthetic writings. Peter Uwe Hohendahl opens with a pair of chapters that consider Adorno's years of exile in the united States during the Second World War and his return in the early 1950s to a West Germany harrowed by its recent Nazi past and responsibility for the Holocaust. Hohendahl then examines Adorno's writings on literature, language, poetry, philosophy, and mass culture in relation to modern history.
Examines problems of German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish identity through analysis of the figure of Moses in the works of Heine, Kafka, Freud, and Schoenberg. Discusses the view of Moses as the liberator of oppressed Jewry on the background of antisemitism in 19th-20th century Europe. See especially pp. 69-77, "Freud and Antisemitism".