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This is Camden House’s general German studies series, in which numerous titles have appeared since the early 1980s. It welcomes a broad range of topics and approaches - from traditional, narrowly literary studies on one hand to forays into cultural studies and cultural history on the other, from approaches based on traditional close reading to those emphasizing theory, from feminist to postmodern to multicultural. All periods of German culture and literature are fair game, from medieval Spielmannsepen to currently emerging writers of the twenty-first century.

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253 results in Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture

Page 6 of 13

The Wounded Self
  • Writing Illness in Twenty-First-Century German Literature
  • Nina Schmidt
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 July 2018
    Print publication:
    01 June 2018
  • In the German-speaking world there has been a new wave - intensifying since 2007 - of autobiographically inspired writing on illness and disability, death and dying. Nina Schmidt's book takes such writing seriously as literature, examining how the authors of such personal narratives come to write of their experiences between the poles of cliché and exceptionality. Identifying shortcomings in the approaches taken thus far to such texts, she makes suggestions as to how to better read such narratives from the stance of literary scholarship, then demonstrates the value of a literary disability studies approach to such writing with close readings of Charlotte Roche's Schoßgebete (2011), Kathrin Schmidt's Du stirbst nicht (2009), Verena Stefan's Fremdschläfer (2007), and - in the final, comparative chapter - Christoph Schlingensief's So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein! Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung (2009) and Wolfgang Herrndorf's blog-cum-book Arbeit und Struktur (2010-13). Schmidt shows that authors dealing with illness and disability do so with an awareness of their precarious subject position in the public eye, a position they negotiate creatively. Writing the liminal experience of serious illness along the borders of genre, moving between fictional and autobiographical modes, they carve out spaces from which they speak up and share their personal stories in the realm of literature, to political ends.Nina Schmidt is a postdoctoral researcher in the Friedrich Schlegel School of Literary Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Hanns Eisler's Art Songs
  • Arguing with Beauty
  • Heidi Hart
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    28 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 June 2018
  • Best known for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, composer Hanns Eisler also set nineteenth-century German poetry to music that both absorbs and disturbs the Lieder tradition. This book traces Eisler's art songs (German: Kunstlieder) through twentieth-century political crises from World War I to Nazi-era exile and from Eisler's postwar deportation from the U.S. to the ideological pressures he faced in the early German Democratic Republic. His art songs are presented not as an escape from the "dark times" Brecht lamented but rather as a way to intervene in the nationalist appropriation of aesthetic material.This book follows a chronological arc from Eisler's early Morgenstern songs to his Lied-like setting of Brecht's 1939 "To Those Who Come After" and his treatment of Hölderlin's poetry in the 1940s Hollywood Songbook; the final two chapters focus on Eisler's Goethe settings in the early GDR, followed by his late Serious Songs recalling Brahms in their reflective approach. In its combination of textual and musicological analysis, this book balances technical and lay vocabulary to reach readers with or without musical background. The author's practical perspective as a singer also informs the book, as she addresses not only what Eisler asks of the voice but also the challenge of evoking both intimacy and distance in his politically fraught art songs.Heidi Hart holds a PhD in German Studies from Duke University. She is an instructor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Utah State University.

Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture
  • Edited by Jill E. Twark, Axel Hildebrandt
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 May 2015
  • Social-injustice dilemmas such as poverty, unemployment, and racism are subjects of continuing debate in European societies and in Germany in particular, as solutions are difficult and progress often comes slowly. Such discussions are not limited to opposing newspaper editorials, position papers, or legislative forums, however; creative works expound on these topics as well, but their contributions to the debate are often marginalized.
    This collection of new essays explores how contemporary German-language literary, dramatic, filmic, musical, and street artists are grappling with social-justice issues that affect Germany and the wider world, surveying more than a decade's worth of works of German literature and art in light of the recent paradigm shift in cultural criticism called the "ethical turn." Central themes include the legacy of the politically engaged 1968 generation, eastern Germany and the process of unification, widening economic disparity as a result of political policies and recession, and problems of integration and inclusivity for ethnic and religious minorities as migration to Germany has increased.

    Contributors: Monika Albrecht, Olaf Berwald, Robert Blankenship, Laurel Cohen-Pfister, Jack Davis, Bastian Heinsohn, Axel Hildebrandt, Deborah Janson, Karolin Machtans, Ralf Remshardt, Alexandra Simon-López, Patricia Anne Simpson, Maria Stehle, Jill E. Twark.

    Jill E. Twark is Associate Professor of German at East Carolina University. Axel Hildebrandt is Associate Professor of German at Moravian College.

My Shadow in Dachau
  • Poems by Victims and Survivors of the Concentration Camp
  • Edited by Dorothea Heiser, Stuart Taberner
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 June 2014
  • The concentration camp at Dachau was the first established by the Nazis, opened shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933. It first held political prisoners, but later also forced laborers, Soviet POWs, Jews, and other "undesirables." More than 30,000 deaths were documented there, with many more unrecorded. In the midst of the horror, some inmates turned to poetry to provide comfort, to preserve their sense of humanity, or to document their experiences. Some were or would later become established poets; others were prominent politicians or theologians; still others were ordinary men and women. This anthology contains 68 poems by 32 inmates of Dachau, in 10 different original languages and facing-page English translation, along with short biographies. A prologue by Walter Jens and an introduction by Dorothea Heiser from the original German edition are joined here by a foreword by Stuart Taberner of the University of Leeds. All the poems, having arisen in the experience or memory of extreme human suffering, are testimonies to the persistence of the humanity and creativity of the individual. They are also a warning not to forget the darkest chapter of history and a challenge to the future not to allow it to be repeated. Dorothea Heiser holds an MA from the University of Freiburg. Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society at the University of Leeds.

Women and German Drama
  • Playwrights and their Texts 1860–1945
  • Sarah Colvin
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 March 2018
    Print publication:
    03 February 2003
  • For women, according to the contemporary Austrian dramatist Elfriede Jelinek, writing for the theater is an act of transgression. The idea that drama as a grand public genre resists women writers has become established in recent scholarship. But Jelinek herself has won the Büchner Prize, the most prestigious award in German letters, and there is a wealth of dramatic work by women from the 20th century and before: both facts seem to contradict the notion of women's exclusion from drama. So why has drama by women appear to have been written against the odds, and why has it, until very recently, been missing from literary histories? This book looks in detail at women's playwriting in German between 1860 and 1945, and at its reception by critics. Many of the works considered have never before been analyzed by modern scholarship; others, notably the plays of Marieluise Fleisser and Else Lasker-Schüler, are well known, but are read here for the first time in the context of earlier dramatic work by women. Sarah Colvin seeks modes of reading that do justice both to the dramatic texts as 'performance' texts, and to the sense of 'otherness' experienced by the woman writer in a male-dominated literary and theatrical environment. She concludes that an understanding of the techniques developed by women playwrights of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can enrich our reading not only of Fleisser and Lasker, but of contemporary dramatists such as Jelinek. If all the world's a stage, playwrights can theoretically be seen as in control of the world they create; this book asks to what extent women dramatists manage to use the space of the drama to reflect the world that 'they' experience. Sarah Colvin is Reader in German at the University of Edinburgh.

Women and Family Life in Early Modern German Literature
  • Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 March 2018
    Print publication:
    28 November 2003
  • Writers of sixteenth-century German popular literature took great interest in describing, debating, commenting on, and prescribing gender roles, and discourses of gender can be traced in texts of all kinds from this period. This book focuses on popular works by Georg Wickram, Jakob Frey, Martin Montanus, and Johann Fischart, all of whom published novels, joke books, plays and/or moral treatises on marriage and family life in Strasbourg in the sixteenth century. Their works express not only their own ideas on women's roles as wives and mothers, but also societal values at a time of religious, political, and cultural change. The view of gender issues provided by these writers is not a simple one, as they ascribed widely varying characteristics to 'woman' and her relationship to 'man.' The book thus analyzes the social and cultural construction of the concept of 'woman' as indicated not only by the narrators' comments, but also by the relationships and roles of men and women characters in the narratives. Overall, the focus is on the disparities that persisted in the sixteenth-century discourse of gender, confusing all attempts to arrive at definitive gender roles. In the end, the study argues for something that can best be described as a 'flowing continuity' or a 'continuous flow' in the discourses that form the sixteenth-century concepts of 'woman' and 'man.' Elisabeth Wåghäll-Nivre is associate professor of German at Växjö University, Sweden.

High Modernism
  • Aestheticism and Performativity in Literature of the 1920s
  • Joshua Kavaloski
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 March 2018
    Print publication:
    15 November 2014
  • High modernism is accepted shorthand for the core phase of literary modernism in the 1920s, when Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Mann, Kafka, Proust, Gide, and others published pivotal works. While there is consensus about the term's meaning, the value and significance of the works it designates are highly contested. For advocates who helped establish its place in the canon, the works of high modernism mark the culmination of literature as high art, while other critics see them as elitist, inaccessible, patriarchal, imperialist, reactionary. Despite this wide range of judgments, all take for granted that high modernism's main features are aestheticist: formal innovation and detachment from history, society, and politics. This book reconsiders that supposition, arguing that high modernist texts epitomize performativity, that is, that they transcend the quiescence of literary aesthetics and affect the extratextual world. Writers such as Kafka, Woolf, Mann, and Faulkner privilege form not as an end in itself but as a means to empower the sociopolitical function of literature. By exploring the performative role of literary works fromthe 1920s, this book provides a more nuanced understanding of high modernism and resituates it within literary history. Joshua Kavaloski is Associate Professor and Director of the German Studies Program at Drew University.

Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism
  • Language, Violence, and Identity
  • Sarah Colvin
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 March 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009
  • In 1970 Ulrike Meinhof abandoned a career as a political journalist to join the Red Army Faction; captured as a terrorist along with other members of the group in 1972, she died an unexplained death in a high-security prison in 1976. A charismatic spokesperson for the RAF, she has often come near to being idealized as a freedom fighter, despite her use of extreme violence. In an effort to understand how terrorism takes root, Sarah Colvin seeks a dispassionate view of Meinhof and a period when West Germany was declaring its own "war on terror." Ulrike Meinhof always remained a writer, and this book focuses on the role of language in her development and that of the RAF: how Meinhof came to justify violence to the point of murder, creating an identity for the RAF as resistance fighters in an imagined state of war that was reinforced by the state's adoption of what Andreas Musolff has called 'war terminology.' But its all-powerful identity as a fighting group eroded the RAF's empathy with other human beings - even those it once claimed to be 'fighting for.' It became a closed unit, self-justifying and immobilized by its own conviction that everything it did must be right. This is the first specialized study of Meinhof and the RAF in English - which is remarkable given the current interest in the topic in both Europe and the U.S. Sarah Colvin is Professor and Eudo C. Mason Chair of the German Department at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

The Space of Words
  • Exile and Diaspora in the Works of Nelly Sachs
  • Jennifer Hoyer
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 March 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2013
  • Nelly Sachs (1891-1970) has long been regarded as one of the most significant Holocaust poets. Her conception of language and words as a landscape has been understood by scholars and critics as an exilic ersatz Heimat for the lost German homeland of a displaced poet. This reading, however, is based entirely on her postwar poems. Such an isolated approach to her complex body of work is increasingly historically problematic; it is also at odds with Sachs's generally cyclical poetic process.
    In 'The Space of Words', Jennifer Hoyer offers the first sustained critical analysis of Sachs's largely unanalyzed prewar poetry and prose, as well as the first analysis that examines structural and thematic ties between the prewar works and the Nobel-Prize-winning postwar poetry. Through close readings of both Sachs's prewar and postwar works, Hoyer reveals a diasporic rather than exilic conception of the landscape of language, a position of constant wandering rather than static longing for return. This diasporic poetics promotes the intellectual and linguistic power of the wanderer and opens new insights into Sachs's essential significance as a Holocaust poet and a twentieth-century German-Jewish writer wary of the link of literary language to geopolitics and the narrative of nations. Jennifer Hoyer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Arkansas.

Approaches to Kurban Said's Ali and Nino
  • Love, Identity, and Intercultural Conflict
  • Edited by Carl Niekerk, Cori Crane
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    30 August 2017
    Print publication:
    30 August 2017
  • Ali and Nino is a novel published in German in 1937 under the alias "Kurban Said," a love story between a Muslim man and a Christian woman set in Baku, Azerbaijan, during World War I and the country's brief independence. It was a major success, translated into several other languages, but was forgotten by the end of World War II. Recent research by the journalist Tom Reiss has revealed the identity of the author as Lev/Leo Nussimbaum (1905-1942), a Jewish man born in Baku who converted to Islam, worked as a journalist in Berlin, and died forgotten in exile. Reiss's discovery has spurred new interest in the novel, as has the fact that the book prefigures today's perceived conflicts between East and West or Islam and Christianity, but also suggests a more peaceful model of intercultural living in multiethnic Baku's melting pot of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. The present volume collects twelve new essays on different aspects of the text by scholars from a variety of disciplines and cultural backgrounds. It is intended to showcase the suitability of Ali and Nino for inclusion in a curriculum focused on German, world literature, or area studies, and to suggest a variety of approaches to the novel while also appealing to its fans.Contributors: Sara Abdoullah-Zadeh, Cori Crane, Chase Dimock, Christine Rapp Dombrowski, Elizabeth Weber Edwards, Anja Haensch, Kamaal Haque, Lisabeth Hock, Ruchama Johnston-Bloom, Carl Niekerk, Elke Pfitzinger, Soraya Saatchi, Daniel Schreiner, Azade Seyhan.Carl Niekerk is Professor of German with affiliate appointments in French, Comparative and World Literature, and Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Cori Crane is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Long Shadow of the Past
  • Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film, and Culture
  • Katya Krylova
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    11 August 2017
    Print publication:
    11 August 2017
  • The process of coming to terms with its National Socialist past has been a long and difficult one in Austria. It is only over the past thirty years that the country's view of its role during the Third Reich has shifted decisively from that of victimhood to complicity, prompted by the Waldheim affair of 1986-1988. Austria's writers, filmmakers, and artists have been at the center of this process, holding up a mirror to the country's present and drawing attention to a still disturbing past. Katya Krylova's book undertakes close readings of key contemporary Austrian literary texts, films, and memorials that treat the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust. The analysis focuses on texts by Robert Schindel, Elfriede Jelinek, and Anna Mitgutsch, documentary films by Ruth Beckermann and by Margareta Heinrich and Eduard Erne, as well as recent memorial projects in Vienna, examining what these reveal about the evolving memory culture in contemporary Austria. Aimed at a broad readership, the book will be a key reference point for university teachers, undergraduates, and postgraduates engaged in scholarship on contemporary Austrian literature, film, and visual culture, and for general readers interested in confrontations with the National Socialist past in the Austrian context. Katya Krylova is a Germanist specializing in modern and contemporary Austrian Studies. She holds a PhD in German Literature from the Department of German and Dutch, University of Cambridge. The Long Shadow of the Past is her second book.

Heiner Müller's Democratic Theater
  • The Politics of Making the Audience Work
  • Michael Wood
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    11 August 2017
    Print publication:
    11 August 2017
  • The East German playwright Heiner Müller (1929-1995) is one of the most influential European dramatists and theater directors since Brecht. While critical literature on Müller often discusses the politics of his works, analysis tends to stop at the level of the text, neglecting the theatrical events that emerge from it and the audiences for which it was written and performed. Situating his study within Müller's interests in democracy and audience activity, Michael Wood addresses these gaps in scholarship, making an original contribution to the understanding of Müller's work as playwright and director. In 1985, Müller spoke of the importance of a 'democratic' theater: one that confronts theatergoers with densely contradictory material that they must interpret for themselves, reflecting the complexity of material reality and encouraging them to question their participation in political life. Wood's study shows that Müller sought to do this in his combined 1988 production of Der Lohndrücker, Der Horatier, and Wolokolamsker Chaussee IV: Kentauren, staged at a time when questions of democracy were at the forefront of East German consciousness. It also demonstrates that from the beginning of his career Müller tried to make theater that would create a form of democracy both within and outside the theater. Michael Wood is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where he received his PhD in 2014.

A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine
  • Edited by Roger F. Cook
  • With contributions by Willi Goetschel , Jeffrey A. Grossman , Gerhard Hoehn , Robert C. Holub , Joseph A. Kruse , Michael Perraudin , Paul Peters , Anthony Phelan and Paul Reitter
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    29 July 2017
    Print publication:
    15 August 2002
  • As the most prominent German-Jewish Romantic writer, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) became a focal point for much of the tension generated by the Jewish assimilation to German culture in a time marked bya growing emphasis on the shared ancestry of the German Volk. As both an ingenious composer of Romantic verse and the originator of modernist German prose, he defied nationalist-Romantic concepts of creative genius that grounded German greatness in an idealist tradition of Dichter und Denker. And as a brash, often reckless champion of freedom and social justice, he challenged not only the reactionary ruling powers of Restoration Germany but also the incipient nationalist ideology that would have fateful consequences for the new Germany--consequences he often portended with a prophetic vision born of his own experience. Reaching to the heart of the `German question,' the controversies surrounding Heine have been as intense since his death as they were in his own lifetime, often serving as an acid test for important questions of national and social consciousness. This new volume of essays by scholars from Germany, Britain, Canada, and the United States offers new critical insights on key recurring issues in his work: the symbiosis of German and Jewish culture; emerging nationalism among the European peoples; critical views of Romanticism and modern philosophy; Europeanculture on the threshold to modernity; irony, wit, and self-critique as requisite elements of a modern aesthetic; changing views on teleology and the dialectics of history; and final thoughts and reconsiderations from his last, prolonged years in a sickbed. Contributors: Michael Perraudin, Paul Peters, Roger F. Cook, Willi Goetschel, Gerhard Hoehn, Paul Reitter, Robert C. Holub, Jeffrey Grossman, Anthony Phelan, Joseph A. Kruse, and George F. Peters.
    Roger F. Cook is professor of German at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Suddenly Everything Was Different
  • German Lives in Upheaval
  • Edited by Dwight D. Allman
  • Olaf Georg Klein
  • Translated by Ann McGlashan
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    11 May 2017
    Print publication:
    15 June 2008
  • What happens when the world in which people have crafted identities for themselves and lived their lives suddenly disappears? How does a person -- or a nation -- confront such a shock? From 1990 to 1993, at an unparalleled moment in German history, Olaf Georg Klein interviewed almost a hundred fellow former East German citizens, probing their experiences of the sudden collapse of the German Democratic Republic, then crafting that material into twelve first-person narratives. The result is a literary account whose narrators include representatives from the cities and the countryside, from young and old, from the East German power elite and the resistance, as well as from those in position to be critical of both the GDR and united Germany. The book was a sensation in Germany upon its publication in 1994, and the translation will be of interest to students and scholars in history and political science, sociology, psychology, and literary studies. It includes an introduction and extensive annotations to assist the reader in understanding the East German and unified German contexts.

    Olaf Georg Klein's novel Aftermath was published in translation by Northwestern University Press in 1999. Ann McGlashan is Associate Professor of German and Dwight D. Allman is Associate Professor of Political Science, both at Baylor University.

When Heimat Meets Hollywood
  • German Filmmakers and America, 1985–2005
  • Christine Haase
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    11 May 2017
    Print publication:
    15 November 2007
  • The film histories of Germany and the United States have long been seen as intertwined, but scholarship has focused on émigré works of the 1930s and 1940s, on links between Weimar film and American film noir, and on the conflicted relationship between directors of the New German Cinema and Hollywood. Recently, German film studies has begun reexamining the interconnection of the two film cultures and focusing on the internationalism of German cinema, but little research has been done on contemporary German directors' involvement in American cinema, a gap in scholarship that this book fills. Thestudy offers ways of understanding current German cinematic engagement with America and different directorial responses to the hegemonic pressures of Hollywood. It delineates the historical trajectory of German-American film relations in the 20th century, then analyzes the careers and works of four German-born directors who have significant ties with American cinema: Wolfgang Petersen, Roland Emmerich, Percy Adlon, and Tom Tykwer. A series of close readings of their productions isolates the cinematic practices and strategies with which these filmmakers negotiate the different national cultural and cinematic paradigms they traverse. The book analyzes constructions of national cultural identity, probes the boundaries of national cinemas, and expands our understanding of emerging hybrid filmcultures. It is a contribution to German film studies and to the emerging field of transnational film studies.

    Christine Haase is Associate Professor of German at the University of Georgia.

Writing the Revolution
  • The Construction of "1968" in Germany
  • Ingo Cornils
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    09 May 2017
    Print publication:
    15 September 2016
  • In Germany, the concept of "1968" is enduring and synonymous with the German Student Movement, and is viewed, variously, as a fundamental liberalization, a myth, a second foundation, or an irritation. The movement's aims - radical re-imagination of the political and economic order and social hierarchy - have been understood as requiring a "long march." While the movement has been judged at best a"successful failure," cultural elites continue to engage in the construction of 1968. Ingo Cornils's book argues that writing about 1968 in Germany is no longer about the historical events or the specific objectives of a bygone counterculture, but is instead a moral touchstone, a marker of social group identity meant to keep alive (or at bay) a utopian agenda that continues to fire the imagination. The book demonstrates that the representation of 1968 as a "foundational myth" suits the needs of a number of surprisingly heterogeneous groups, and that even attempts to deconstruct the myth strengthen it. Cornils brings together for the first time the historical, literary, and media representations of the movement, showing the motivation behind and effect of almost five decades of writing about 1968. In so doing, Cornils challenges the way 1968 has been instrumentalized: as a powerful imaginary that has colonized every aspect of life in Germany, and as symbolic capital in cultural and political debates.

    Ingo Cornils is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Leeds.

Music into Fiction
  • Composers Writing, Compositions Imitated
  • Theodore Ziolkowski
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    09 May 2017
    Print publication:
    01 February 2017
  • This book deals with three aspects that have been neglected in the burgeoning field of music and literature. The "First Movement" of the book considers writers from German Romanticism to the present who, like Robert Schumann, first saw themselves as writers before they turned to composition, or, like E. T. A. Hoffmann and Anthony Burgess, sought careers in music before becoming writers. It also considers the few operatic composers, such as Richard Wagner and Arnold Schoenberg, who wrote their own libretti. The "Second Movement" turns to literary works based specifically on musical compositions. This group includes, first and more generally, prose works whose author chose a specific musical form such as sonata or fugue as an organizational model. And second, it includes novels based structurally or thematically on specific compositions, such as Bach's Goldberg Variations. The "Finale" concludes with a unique case: efforts by modern composers to render musically the compositions described in detail by Thomas Mann in his novel Doktor Faustus. This book, which addresses itself to readers interested generally in music and literature and is written in a reader-friendly style, draws attention to unexplored dimensions of the music-literature relationship and to the sometimes unrecognized talents of certain writers and composers.

    Theodore Ziolkowski is ProfessorEmeritus of German and Comparative Literature, Princeton University.

A Companion to the Works of Elias Canetti
  • With contributions by Penka Angelova , Irene Stocksiecker Di Maio , Svoboda Alexandra Dimitrova , William Collins Donahue , Anne Fuchs , Helga W. Kraft , Michael Mack , Wolfgang Mieder , Harriet Murphy , Johannes Pankau , Julian Preece , Hans S. Reiss , Ritchie Robertson and Sigurd Paul Scheichl
  • Edited by Dagmar C.G. Lorenz
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    28 April 2017
    Print publication:
    26 July 2004
  • The Bulgarian-born scholar and author Elias Canetti was one of the most astute witnesses and analysts of the mass movements and wars of the first half of the 20th century. Born a Sephardic Jew and raised at first in the Bulgarian and Ladino languages, he chose to write in German. He was awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature for his oeuvre, which includes dramas, essays, diaries, aphorisms, the novel Die Blendung (Auto-da-Fé) and the long interdisciplinary treatise Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power). These works express Canetti's thought-provoking ideas on culture and the human psyche with special focus on the phenomena of power, conflict, and survival. Canetti's masterful prose, his linguistic innovations, his brilliant satires and conceits continue to fascinate scholarsand general readers alike; his challenging, genre-bending writings merge theory and literature, essay and diary entry. This Companion volume contains original essays by renowned scholars from aroundthe world who examine Canetti's writing and thought in the context of pre- and post-fascist Europe, providing a comprehensive scholarly introduction. Contributors: William C. Donahue, Anne Fuchs, HansReiss, Julian Preece, Wolfgang Mieder, Sigurd P. Scheichel, Helga Kraft, Harriet Murphy, Irene S. Di Maio, Ritchie Robertson, Johannes G. Pankau, Dagmar C.G. Lorenz, Penka Angelova and Svoboda A. Dimitrova, Michael Mack.
    Dagmar C. G. Lorenz is professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

A Companion to Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan
  • With contributions by Michael S. Batts , Danielle Buschinger , Marion E. Gibbs , Nigel Harris , Sidney M. Johnson , Ulrich Mueller , Ann Marie Rasmussen , Daniel Rocher , Adrian Stevens , Neil Thomas and Alois Wolf
  • Edited by Will Hasty
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    28 April 2017
    Print publication:
    13 January 2003
  • The legend of Tristan and Isolde -- the archetypal narrative about the turbulent effects of all-consuming, passionate love -- achieved its most complete and profound rendering in the German poet Gottfried von Strassburg's verse romance Tristan (ca. 1200-1210). Along with his great literary rival Wolfram von Eschenbach and his versatile predecessor Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried is considered one of three greatest poets produced by medieval Germany, and over the centuries his Tristan has lost none of its ability to attract with the beauty of its poetry and to challenge -- if not provoke -- with its sympathetic depiction of adulterous love. The essays, written by a dozen leading Gottfried specialists in Europe and North America, provide definitive treatments of significant aspectsof this most important and challenging high medieval version of the Tristan legend. They examine aspects of Gottfried's unparalleled narrative artistry; the important connections between Gottfried'sTristan and the socio-cultural situation in which it was composed; and the reception of Gottfried's challenging romance both by later poets in the Middle Ages and by nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors, composers, and artists -- particularly Richard Wagner. The volume also contains new interpretations of significant figures, episodes, and elements (Riwalin and Blanscheflur, Isolde ofthe White Hands, the Love Potion, the performance of love, the female figures) in Gottfried's revolutionary romance, which provocatively elevates a sexual, human love to a summum bonum.

    Will Hasty is Professor of German at the University of Florida. He is the editor of Companion to Wolfram's "Parzival," (Camden House, 1999).

A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller
  • With contributions by Dieter Borchmeyer , Otto Dann , Karl S. Guthke , Walter Hinderer , Rolf-Peter Janz , Wulf Koepke , Norbert Oellers , David V. Pugh , Lesley Sharpe , Werner von Stransky-Stranka-Greifenfels and James M. van der Laan
  • Edited by Steven D. Martinson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    28 April 2017
    Print publication:
    19 August 2005
  • Friedrich Schiller is not merely one of Germany's foremost poets. He is also one of the major German contributors to world literature. The undying words he gave to characters such as Marquis Posa in Don Carlos and Wilhelm Tell in the eponymous drama continue to underscore the need for human freedom. Schiller cultivated hope in the actualization of moral knowledge through aesthetic education and critical reflection, leading to his ideal of a more humane humanity. At the same time, he was fully cognizant of the problems that attend various forms of idealism. Yet for Schiller, ultimately, love remains the gravitational center of the universe and of human existence, and beyond life and death joy prevails. This collection of cutting-edge essays by some of the world's leading Schiller experts constitutes a milestone in scholarship. It includes in-depth discussions of the writer's major dramatic and poetic works, his essays on aesthetics, and his activities as historian, anthropologist, and physiologist, as well as of his relation to the ancients and of Schiller reception in 20th-century Germany.

    Contributors: Steven D. Martinson, Walter Hinderer, David Pugh, Otto Dann, Werner von Stransky-Stranka-Greifenfels, J. M. van der Laan, Rolf-Peter Janz, Lesley Sharpe, Norbert Oellers, Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl S. Guthke, Wulf Koepke.

    Steven D. Martinson is Professor of German at the University of Arizona.

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