You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
An authoritative English translation of Goethe’s classic autobiographical account of war and conquest in the age of revolution In August 1792, Goethe accompanied Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, during the Prusso-Austrian invasion of revolutionary France to restore Louis XVI as king. After the Cannonade of Valmy that September, the German armies were forced to retreat, never again to threaten the heart of France until the end of the Napoleonic era. The French subsequently invaded the Rhineland and captured the city of Mainz, claiming it for the French Republic. When German armies besieged Mainz, Goethe witnessed the capture of the city at the close of 1793. Goethe’s narrative of these events has become a classic text for the history of Franco-German relations during the revolutionary period. A product of recollection, historical hindsight, and considerable study of other published sources, it is a fascinating document of the military catastrophe exposing the decline of Prussian power since the death of Frederick II, which eventually culminated in Napoleon’s devastating 1806 victory at Jena and Auerstedt.
This book gives us our first clear look at how the man and his moment met to create “critical theory.” An intimate picture of the quintessential twentieth-century transatlantic intellectual, the book is also a window on the cultural ferment of Adorno’s day—and its ongoing importance in our own.
Cassirer's conception of culture & theory of symbolism anticipated much of later cultural theory. The essays in this volume explore aspects of his thinking & demonstrate the influence that it had on later scholarship.
This book examines how one aspect of the social and technological situation of literature--namely, the postal system--determined how literature was produced and what was produced within literature. Language itself has the structure of a relay, where what is transmitted depends on a prior withholding. The social arrangements and technologies for achieving this transmission thus have had a particularly powerful impact on the imagination of literature as a medium. The book has three parts. The first part reconstructs the postal conditions of classic and Romantic literature: the invention of postage in the seventeenth century, which transformed the postal system into a service meant to be used b...
German studies scholars from various disciplines often use and reference ethnography, yet do not often present ethnography as a core methodology and research approach. Former Neighbors, Future Allies? emphasizes how German studies engages in methods and theories of ethnography. Through a variety of topics and from multiple perspectives including literature, folklore, history, sociology, and anthropology, this volume draws attention to how ethnography bridges transdisciplinary and international research in German studies.
A major rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to early evolutionary science The 120 years between Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time. In Human Forms, Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel's formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses—even as the two were separating into distinct domains. Duncan focuses on several crisis points: the contentious formation of a natural...
During its twenty-five years as a work-in-progress, William H. Gass's mammoth magnum opus became a legend of the literary world, the Sasquatch of contemporary American fiction. Along with an included interview with the author, the contributors to this study help situate Gass's challenging narrative within the remarkable career of a notable philosopher, essayist, and author of fiction. Contributors examine the book's quarrel with history, its engagement with issues of ethics and aesthetics, its representation of personality, its distinctive style and structure, its sophisticated metafictional texture, along with much else. What is going on in The Tunnel is not always immediately apparent, but the essays included in here tease out its secrets and concentrate our attention on details of an exasperating and exhilarating literary achievement.
In the late Enlightenment, a new imperative began to inform theories of interpretation: all literary texts should be read in the same way that we read the Bible. However, this assumption concealed a problem—there was no coherent "we" who read the Bible in the same way. In Secularism and Hermeneutics, Yael Almog shows that several prominent thinkers of the era, including Johann Gottfried Herder, Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, constituted readers as an imaginary "we" around which they could form their theories and practices of interpretation. This conception of interpreters as a universal community, Almog argues, es...
On the basis of intensive study of the entire corpus of Lessing's philosophical and theological writings as well as the extensive secondary literature, the author leads the reader into the systematic core of Lessing's highly elusive religious thought.