Three late prose works of the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), published between 1983 and 1985, display a number of interesting similarities and intertextual references in form and content. They are considered here as a single, trilogy-like work, replacing the monumental Extinction (which appeared in 1986 but was completed as early as 1981/2) as Bernhard's magnum opus. Taking as its point of departure a close textual analysis, the work attempts to unveil the internal construction of the novel rather than second-guess the author and his intentions. The underlying...

Adalbert Stifter has always been viewed as a natural heir to the Great Classical tradition, even by those critics who detect disturbing subtexts in his fiction. But he should be viewed quite differently: however well disguised, he is in truth a closet modernist, and a major trailblazer for Kafka and the Absurd. This is most evident in his late fiction, which has been almost universally ignored, dismissed or disparaged by his critics. His last novel Witiko in particular has been conspicuously neglected by both nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics. Ragg-Kirkby demonstrates -- largely by...

Theodor Storm (1817-88), one of the leading literary Realists of the nineteenth century, achieved world-wide popularity with the novella Immensee/ in 1849. The work, which Storm himself referred to as a 'Perle deutscher Poesie' (pearl of German poetry) reached over thirty editions and was translated into 17 languages by the time of the author's death. But in addition to being called a masterpiece by such leading literary lights of the day as Theodor Fontane and Paul Heyse, Immensee also attracted its share of criticism from the first, for instance as a mere sentimental love story. Then in the...

The aim of this book is to explore "that post-Nietzschean archipelago of German literature which no one mind can hope to map, let alone inhabit" (Michael Hamburger) and to introduce it to the English-speaking reader for the first time, in accessible form. The study starts from the assumption that the daring imagery and cosmic sweep of Thus Spake Zarathustra provided the impetus for the creation of visionary epics and cosmological poetic universes. The book is original in that it presents for the first time a selection of writers hitherto regarded as impossible of access and reduces their epic...

Heinrich Mann, once counted among the most important literary figures in Germany, is known to most English-speaking readers only as the brother of Thomas Mann, or in connection with Marlene Dietrich and the film -The Blue Angel, - which was based on one of his novels. Only a few of his novels and stories and virtually none of his hundreds of provocative essays are available in English. But he deserves special attention for the window his work provides onto the intellectual, social, and political history of Germany, especially Germany's struggle with the question of democracy in the early...

Fritz Lang's classic 1927 film Metropolis has justifiably become an icon for the complexities of Weimar culture. Among the important general issues it also raises are the relation between ideology and art, the status and authorship of the film text in the entertainment market, the city, the construction of gender, the relation between the human body and the machine in modernity, and the relation between mass and high culture. This volume provides a broad range of materials and resources for the study of Lang's film, including both well-known, previously published critical essays and...

McDonald's study offers fresh insights into Mann's Joseph tetralogy in two ways. Beginning with Mann's well documented love for public performance, he rereads the Joseph novels as a script, showing how performance figures prominently in the form as well as the substance of the narrative. Then he interprets several of the essay-lectures composed during the Joseph years (1926-1943), emphasizing their performative qualities and their conscious (and subliminal) interweavings with the novel. Mann's passionate re-enactment of Kleist's play -Amphitryon- in his 1927 lecture provided a model of...

Among the Jewish academics and intellectuals expelled from Germany and Austria during the Nazi era were many specialists in German literature. Strangely, their impact on the practice of Germanistik in the United States, England, and Canada has been given little attention. Who were they? Did their vision of German literature and culture differ significantly from that of those who remained in their former homeland? What problems did they face in the American and British academic settings? Above all, how did they help shape German studies in the postwar era? This unique and important symposium,...

This book treats both the literary history of the modern German novel and theoretical considerations about gender and 18th-century narrative strategies. It attempts to overcome a two-fold division in scholarship by treating Christoph Martin Wieland's Geschichte des Agathon and Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Frauleins von Sternheim, the two novels generally considered to be foundational in the development of the German Bildungsroman, in conjunction, rather than as examples of unrelated traditions, and by considering the reciprocal influence of fictional and theoretical writing dealing...

German literature played an important part in the formation of the minds and imaginations of progressive nineteenth-century New England intellectuals; this study looks especially at the Transcendentalists of the Concord circle, presenting five portraits of authors and their worlds -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Louisa May Alcott -- showing that each had a peculiarly productive relationship with the literature and intellectual traditions of Germany. The two main chapters of this study are devoted to Emerson and Fuller. Emerson learned German...