This book takes a fresh look at theatre - including the important new genre of opera - in early modern Germany. Taking as a starting-point the importance of rhetoric in early modern boys' education, this study considers the relationship between theatre, persuasion, and social stability, and looks at how the stage helps to develop ideas about women and non-Christian peoples which have not lost their relevance today.

This first comprehensive study of Yiddish in the former Soviet Union chronicles orthographic and other reforms from the state of the language in pre-revolutionary Russia, through active language-planning in the 1920s and 1930s, repression, and subsequent developments up to the 1980s.

Literary studies cannot neglect the study of books, the physical objects through which literary texts are transmitted. Book form is especially relevant to the literature of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, which saw the crucial shift from manuscript to print in Western Europe. This book examines manuscripts and printed editions of three major French writers of this key period: Jean Molinet, Jean Lemaire de Belges and Jean Bouchet. It analyzes presentational features which influence the reading of poems, such as layout, illustration, anthologization and paratext, and...

This book investigates the fictions and fantasies invented by five narrators, examining the purpose which the fictions serve within each text and the means by which each author deliberately draws attention to them. All five authors are shown to be concerned with the kinds of stories which ordinary people tell about themselves and their past lives. This is the first major study of this distinctive trend in post-war German fiction.

The first book in English to attempt a full theoretical analysis of Hegel's philosophy of art, Beauty and Truth examines Hegel's central thesis: that both beauty and truth can be understood in terms of systematic coherence, and that art, as a purveyor of truth, embodies and reflects the beliefs of the societies from which it comes.

This book sheds light on the complexity of medieval German literary culture as it evolved in the course of the thirteenth century (c. 1220-1920) by analysing the attitudes of narrative poets towards the issue of authorship. It describes the various ways in which vernacular writers could address the theme of their own authorship within their literary works, and explores the tensions that arose between such authorial strategies on the one hand and their subsequent manuscript transmission on the other.

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei demonstrates that the exotic, as reflected in major works of German literature and in the philosophy and art that inspires it, provokes central questions about the modern self and the spaces it inhabits. Exotic spaces in the writings of such authors as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gottfried Benn, and Bertold Brecht, along with the thought of Nietzsche, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Simmel and the art of German Expressionism, are shown to present alternatives to the landscape and experience of modernity. In an...

Dunlaith Bird argues that vagabondage - a physical and textual elaboration of gender identity in motion - emerges as a totemic concept in European women's travel writing from 1850. For travellers including Olympe Audouard, Isabella Bird, Isabelle Eberhardt, and Freya Stark, vagabondage is a means of pushing out the physical, geographical, and textual parameters by which 'women' are defined.
Travelling in Different Skins explores the negotiations of European women travel writers from 1850-1950 within the traditionally male-oriented discourses of colonialism and Orientalism. Moving from...

Sarah Roger investigates Jorge Luis Borges's development as an author in light of Franz Kafka's influence, and in consideration of Borges's relationship with his father, Jorge Guillermo Borges (Borges pere, a failed author). Borges believed that much of Kafka's writing derived from his personal experiences, particularly his relationship with his father. This book looks at how reading Kafka helped Borges mediate and make productive use of his own relationship with his father, and it offers a thorough analysis of Borges pere's writing, which is supplemented by an appendix that...

This book presents a narratological analysis of the Kaiserchronik, or chronicle of the emperors, the first verse chronicle to have been written in any European vernacular language, which provides an account of the Roman and Holy Roman emperors from the foundation of Rome to the eve of the Second Crusade. Previous research has concentrated on the structure and sources of the work and emphasized its role as a Christian narrative of history, but this study shows that the Kaiserchronik does not simply illustrate a didactic religious message: it also provides an example of how story-telling...