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The book's primary emphasis is on Bernhard's later fiction, but it also explicates the early texts of the 1960s and 1970s. The book makes use of insights from recent approaches to fiction that pay attention to what can be termed "narrative dynamics." Earlier studies of Bernhard have tended to remain within the descriptive framework established in narrative studies of the 1950s and 1960s; this book views Bernhard's prose works from a more nuanced vantage point."--BOOK JACKET.
Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), a literary figure of international acclaim and arguably Austria's greatest post-World War II writer, became the first of his generation to expose unrelentingly his country's pathological denial of complicity in the Holocaust. Bernhard's writings and indeed his own biography reflect Austria's fraught efforts to define itself as a nation following the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy and the trauma of World War II. Repeatedly he scandalized the nation with novels, plays, and public statements that exposed the convoluted ways Austrians were attempting to come to terms with their Nazi past--or defiantly avoiding doing so. This book, the first comprehensive biography...
The purpose of this volume is to help make the major figures of the contemporary generation of writers in Austria accessible to an English-speaking audience. The fifteen essays cover the life and works of fifteen authors-Aichinger, Artmann, Bauer, Bernhard, Canetti, Ebner, Fried, Frischmuth, Handke, Innerhofer, Jandl, Jonke, Mayrocker, Roth, and Turrini-with each essay written by a specialist. The contributions are designed to be clear and informative for readers with no background in Austrian or German literature, while at the same time sufficiently analytical to make them useful even to specialists in the field. The book should appeal to general readers as well as to students and scholars working in the area of Austrian and German literature or in English and Comparative Literature."
In response to the silence that continues to shroud Austria’s historical past, Austrian literature after 1950 wants to retrace an untold history that left its marks in mental schemata and cultural clichés. The question how literature can refer to the facts silenced by a political unconscious, the question of literary reference and reality description, lies at the core of Austrian literature since the 1950’s. This book traces the development of contemporary Austrian fiction from the 1950s to the 1990s, showing how the Vienna Group’s literary reductionism led to gesture of mere pointing in happening and performance. While strongly indebted to the experimental techniques of the Vienna Group, later Austrian authors such as Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Peter Rosei, and Gerhard Roth employ literary forms and extra-literary media prone to the indexical in an attempt to cut through the net of linguistic and cultural clichés, alluding to the microfascisms latent in common percepts, and indexing a reality that eludes plain description.
A study of women's writing in the Federal Republic, the German Democratic Republic, Austria and Switzerland, 1945-1990.
In international theatre studies, there has been a dearth of studies on Polish contemporary theatre. This book investigates how Polish theatre has changed since 1989 and the fall of Communism. It introduces the most prominent Polish theatre directors, namely Krystian Lupa and his two extremely talented students Krzysztof Warlikowski and Jan Klata. All three of them represent three absolutely different types of aesthetics and ways of thinking about theatre: Krystian Lupa mostly concentrates on Austrian and Russian literature. Krzysztof Warlikowski’s theatre is based on stage versions of William Shakespeare or Ancient authors. Jan Klata focuses his attention on Polish history and current social problems. This book highlights the creativity of Polish contemporary theatre, and shows how different from most theatre traditions in other European countries it is.
The Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti all his life declared himself a “mortal enemy” of death—and here, in English at last, is his landmark book on the subject The Book Against Death is the work of a lifetime: a collection of Elias Canetti’s powerful, disarming, and often bleakly comic observations, diatribes, musings, and commentaries on and against death. Evoking despair, melancholy, and fury, Canetti examines the inevitable demise of all beings—from the ant, the fish, and the worm to an executioner, a court painter, and a Greek god—while fiercely protesting the mass deaths incurred during war and the willingness of the despot to wield death as power. Interspersed with material from philosophers and writers such as Goethe, Walter Benjamin, and Robert Walser, The Book Against Death is ultimately a moving affirmation of the value of life itself. Canetti famously refused to die before he’d read all his obituaries and corrected them. “I accept no death.”—Elias Canetti (1905–1994)
Volume 10, dedicated to 'Comedy, Irony, Parody', celebrates the first decade of Comparative Criticism in a light-hearted vein. Michael Silk opens with a wide-ranging essay asserting the primacy of comedy and declaring its independence of tragedy. T. L. S. Sprigge explores philosophers who dared to write on laughter: Schopenhauer and Bergson. Bernard Harrison looks at the twentieth century's favourite comic novel, Tristram Shandy, in the light of Locke's views on 'the particular'. Peter Brand pursues the theatrical arts of disguises, masking, and gender-swapping through Renaissance Europe, from Ariosto to Shakespeare. Jane H. M. Taylor traces the danse macabre in modern 'black humour'. Christine Brooke-Rose, distinguished novelist and critic, reads from and comments on her own witty fictions. Michael Wood describes how Lolita outwitted her seducer.