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The Weimar Republic (1918-1933) was a crucial moment not only in German history but also in the history of both crime fiction and criminal science. This study approaches the period from a unique perspective - investigating the most notorious criminals of the time and the public's reaction to their crimes. The author argues that the development of a new type of crime fiction during this period - which turned literary tradition on its head by focusing on the criminal and abandoning faith in the powers of the rational detective - is intricately related to new ways of understanding criminality among professionals in the fields of law, criminology, and police science. Considering Weimar Germany not only as a culture in crisis (the standard view in both popular and scholarly studies), but also as a culture of crisis, the author explores the ways in which crime and crisis became the foundation of the Republic's self-definition. An interdisciplinary cultural studies project, this book insightfully combines history, sociology, literary studies, and film studies to investigate a topic that cuts across all of these disciplines.
A cofounder of Dada and its enfant terrible, Walter Serner was a brilliant observer of society - his activities in the 1920s have been called "a dance on the rim of a volcano." His Last Loosening: A Dada Manifesto was written in 1918 and published in 1920. Slightly revised later as Serner became disgusted with Dada, it forms the first part of this volume, its philosophical foundation. A playful "moral codex" to subvert the illusions and stereotypes underpinning society's views on morality and decency, it attacks the contradictions between appearance and reality: "The world wants to be deceived, and is enraged when you do not oblige." Serner's publisher, Paul Steegemann, in a fit of promotion...
In the years leading up to the World Wars, Germany and Austria saw an unprecedented increase in the study and depiction of the criminal. Science, journalism and crime fiction were obsessed with delinquents while ignoring the social causes of crime. As criminologists measured criminals' heads and debated biological predestination, court reporters and crime writers wrote side-splitting or heart-rending stories featuring one of the most popular characters ever created--the hilarious or piteous crook. The author examines the figure of the crook and notions of "Jewish" criminality in a range of antisemitic writing, from Nazi propaganda to court reporting to forgotten classics of crime fiction.
Cool Conduct is an elegant interpretation of attitudes and mentalities that informed the Weimar Republic by a scholar well known for his profound knowledge of this period. Helmut Lethen writes of "cool conduct" as a cultivated antidote to the heated atmosphere of post-World War I Germany, as a way of burying shame and animosity that might otherwise make social contact impossible.
A study of the role of 'little magazines' and their contribution to the making of artistic modernism and the avant-garde across Europe, this volume is a major scholarly achievement of immense value to those interested in material culture of the 20th century.
Series numbering from publisher's Web site.
How Dada is to break its cultural accommodation and containment today necessitates thinking the historical instances through revised application of critical and theoretical models. The volume Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde moves precisely by this motive, bringing together writings which insist upon the continuity of the early twentieth-century moment now at the start of the twenty-first. Engaging the complex and contradictory nature of Dada strategies, instanced in the linguistic gaming and performativity of the movement’s initial formation, and subsequently isolating the specific from the general with essays focusing on Ball, Tzara, Serner, Hausmann, Dix, Heartfield, Schw...
A groundbreaking analysis of two movements of the historical avant-garde
In this lucid and entertaining book, Max Harris offers both a lively introduction to the theater and a sustained meditation on the theatricality of the Incarnation. Arguing that both biblical and dramatic texts should be approached with a theatrical rather than a literary imagination, he offers fresh and scholarly insights into plays as diverse as the medieval "Ordinalia" and Edmond Rostandbs romantic masterpiece "Cyrano de Bergerac," while also probing theatrical theory from Aristotle to Grotowski. At the same time, he renders vividly the comic potential of the gospel narratives and the affirmation of humanity entailed in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. "Theater and Incarnation" moves provocatively and mischievously between the flesh and blood world of the theater and the Word become flesh in Jesus of Nazareth.
Zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts machte zeitgleich mit dem Expressionismus eine neue Kunstform ihre ersten Schritte, die Bild, Sprache und Musik in sich vereinte: der Kinofilm. In Deutschland hatte die expressionistische Ästhetik einen enormen Einfluss auf dieses neue Medium, der sich in Filmen wie Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), Der Golem (1920), Nosferatu (1922) oder Metropolis (1927) zeigt und bis heute seine Spuren hinterlassen hat. Dieser Band analysiert, wie Themen, Motive, Mythen und Ästhetik des expressionistischen Kinos der 1920er Jahre in den audiovisuellen Medien bis ins 21. Jahrhundert fortwirken und welchen Einfluss sie auf Myth Criticism oder auf populäre Gattungen wie Fantasy, Horror oder Science Fiction nach wie vor ausüben.