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The first book to examine Goethe's writings on the daemonic in relation to both Classical philosophy and German Idealism. For Plato, the daemonic is a sensibility that brings individuals into contact with divine knowledge; Socrates was also inspired by a "divine voice" known as his "daimonion." Goethe was introduced to this ancient concept by Hamannand Herder, who associated it with the aesthetic category of genius. This book shows how the young Goethe depicted the idea of daemonic genius in works of the Storm and Stress period, before exploring the daemonic in a series of later poetic and autobiographical works. Reading Goethe's works on the daemonic through theorists such as Lukács, Benjamin, Gadamer, Adorno, and Blumenberg, Nicholls contends that they contain arguments concerning reason, nature, and subjectivity that are central to both European Romanticism and the Enlightenment. Angus Nicholls is Claussen-Simon Foundation Research Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature at the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations in the Department of German, Queen Mary, University of London.
Provides a view of the late Stifter as a forerunner of twentieth-century modernism.Adalbert Stifter has always been viewed as a natural heir to the Great Classical tradition, even by those critics who detect disturbing subtexts in his fiction. But he should be viewed quite differently: however well disguised, heis in truth a closet modernist, and a major trailblazer for Kafka and the Absurd. This is most evident in his late fiction, which has been almost universally ignored, dismissed or disparaged by his critics. His last novel Witiko in particular has been conspicuously neglected by both nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics. Ragg-Kirkby demonstrates -- largely by way of close reading ...
Although The Tin Drum has often been called one of the great novels of the 20th century, most critics have been baffled in attempting to draw its apparent chaos into a single literary framework. Here is the full-length study to penetrate the brilliance of Gunter Grass's style and uncover the novel's mythopoetic core. In A Mythic Journey: Gunter Grass's Tin Drum, author Edward Diller convincingly demonstrates the still valid relationship between modern and classical literary criticism. By reading The Tin Drum as both modern myth and historical epic, he provides a profound and sensitive interpretation of one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.
This study shows how politics and art intermingled in the life and works of one of the most renowned playwrights of German Expressionism, a man who was in many senses paradigmatic of the non-communist Left in the Weimar Republic. Toller sought to preserve the sanctity of the individual against collectivist assaults from the Right and from the Left, but at the same time to meet the needs of a complex society. Ossar demonstrates that the playwright arrived at solutions that were anarchist in nature, deriving from a long European tradition. This is the first in-depth book-length study of Toller and his plays published in English.
Exploring an Anglo-German network of thought and writing in Britain between 1700 and 1790, this volume offers a new approach to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture. It explores a set of radical figures and institutions that are exorbitant, with particular focus on William Blake and Johann Georg Hamann.
This book seeks to move twentieth-century German literary history away from its stubbornly persistent reliance on the political turning-points of 1933 and 1945. In the first part of the book, the authors analyze a synchronic corpus of literary journals, identifying a restorative aesthetic mood in the years 1930-1960 which persists across political date boundaries. In the second part, the careers of five writers are considered diachronically against this prevailing restorative climate: Gottfried Benn, Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Günter Eich, and Peter Huchel. Combining these two approaches, the authors show that a fresh perspective that challenges established literary-historical periodisations can shed light on the common cultural and aesthetic ground shared by writers, editors and critics across the ideological divides of the era.
Investigates how culture in the Age of Goethe shaped and was shaped by a sustained and multifaceted debate about the place of religion in politics, philosophy, and culture. The eighteenth century is usually considered to be a time of increasing secularization in which the primacy of theology was replaced by the authority of reason, yet this lofty intellectual endeavor played itself out in a social and political reality that was heavily impacted by religious customs and institutions. This duality is visible in the literature and culture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany. On the one hand, authors such asGoethe, Schiller, and Kleist are known for their distance from tradi...
An innovative, critical, historically informed, yet accessible reassessment of writers who remained in Nazi Germany and Austria yet expressed nonconformity - even dissent - through their fiction.