Tales of Berlin in American Literature up to the 21st Century

ISBN-13: 9789004312081 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 426 str.

Joshua Parker

Opis

Of all European cities, Americans today are perhaps most curious about Berlin, whose position in the American imagination is an essential component of nineteenth-century, postwar and contemporary transatlantic imagology. Over various periods, Berlin has been a tenuous space for American claims to cultural heritage and to real geographic space in Europe, symbolizing the ultimate evil and the power of redemption. This volume offers a comprehensive examination of the city's image in American literature from 1840 to the present. Tracing both a history of Berlin and of American culture through the ways the city has been narrated across three centuries by some 100 authors through 145 novels, short stories, plays and poems, Tales of Berlin presents a composite landscape not only of the German capital, but of shifting subtexts in American society which have contextualized its meaning for Americans in the past, and continue to do so today.

Recenzje

"Parker's work is a meta-tale of quest and frustration, of mythical past, wished-for projections, and threadbare present, of history, daily life and literature. It is a book of fictional reality, and in-depth documented analysis of endless American mirrors of Berlin and Berliners throughout over one and a half century." - Mariana Net, University of Miskolc US in European Journal of American Studies [Online], 2017 pp. 1-5.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements

Prologue: "a smaller but more intense orchestration"
Landscape
Place and Space

Part One:
American Space
American Berlin Across Three Centuries

Part Two:
A Tale of Berlin
How American Is It
Toy Houses and Playing-Card Lawns
"German" Roots

Part Three:
Rags, Riches and Rooming Houses
Riches
Rags
Rooming Houses
The Great Divorce
Water Crossings

Part Four:
"This is our Armageddon"
Ruined Landscapes, Ruined Women
Women with Attachments: Mermaids, Drink and Drowning
City of Night
"Certain tendencies": Queer Berlin0
Underground Berlin
"Something was different, but nothing had changed"
Contaminating City
Just off the Kurfürstendamm: Spy Fiction
The Garden and the Forest: Natural Space in Berlin
The Weather in Berlin
Isolating Berlin
Naturalizing the Wall
Escape from Berlin

Part Five:
Family Reunions: Searching for Someone in Berlin
Women and Children First: Taming History
Contemporary Voices: Re-Storing Mythologies

Conclusion

Bibliography of Fiction
Bibliography of Secondary Sources
Index

O autorze

Joshua Parker is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Salzburg. He publishes in the areas of narrative theory, transatlantic literature and American studies.