This book is a comprehensive study of the nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine. Anthony Phelan examines the complete range of Heine's work, from the early poetry and 'Pictures of Travel' to the last poems, including personal polemic and journalism. Phelan provides original and detailed readings of Heine's major poetry and throws fresh light on his virtuoso political performances that have too often been neglected by critics. Through his critical relationship with Romanticism, Heine confronted the problem of modernity in startlingly original ways that still speak to the concerns of...

The Bildungsroman--the story of the development or formation of a young man--is the most famous German contribution to the European novel. In this study Michael Minden offers detailed readings of some of the best-known novels in the German language, from Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre to Mann's Der Zauberberg. Taking account of contemporary literary theory, Minden uncovers aspects and motifs that subvert traditional ideas of the Bildungsroman, and raise questions about the function and status of literature.

Bertolt Brecht, one of the most influential European playwrights of the twentieth century, was also a poet of distinction. This volume is the first comprehensive study devoted to his most important collection of political poetry, the Svendborg Poems. The contributors analyze Brecht's work critically and historically, discussing it in relation to questions of poetics, political commitment, exile, propaganda, rhetoric, and the scope and limitations of political poetry. Links are also drawn with the work of German, Soviet and English poets of the period, and with later German poets.

Although the importance of the interplay of literature and philosophy in Germany has often been examined within individual works or groups of works by particular authors, little research has been undertaken into the broader dialogue of German literature and philosophy as a whole. This study offers six chapters by leading specialists on the dialogue between German literary writers and philosophers through their works.

The profound political and social changes Germany has undergone since 1989 have been reflected in an extraordinarily rich range of contemporary writing. Contemporary German Fiction focuses on the debates that have shaped the politics and culture of the new Germany that has emerged from the second half of the 1990s onwards and offers the first comprehensive account of key developments in German literary fiction within their social and historical context. Each chapter begins with an overview of a central theme, such as East German writing, West German writing, writing on the Nazi past, writing...