Hans Henny Jahnn (1894-1959) is one of Germany's most controversial modern authors, in large part due to sharply diverging reactions to the depictions of sado-masochistic brutality, incest, and homoeroticism in his plays and novels. Jahnn's rank as a writer has long been a topic of intense debate between rival schools of critics, and his works have provoked extreme responses, both positive and negative, from a wide spectrum of scholars, writers, and critics, including such prominent figures as Alfred Dblin, Walter Benjamin, Thomas and Klaus Mann, Wolfgang Koeppen, Walter and Adolf Muschg,...

This volume of specially commissioned essays takes a fresh look at the Viennese Jewish dramatist and prose writer Arthur Schnitzler. Fascinatingly, Schnitzler's productive years spanned the final phase of the Habsburg monarchy, World War I, the First Austrian Republic, and the rise of National Socialism, and he realized earlier than many of his contemporaries the threat that racist anti-Semitism posed to the then almost complete assimilation of Austrian Jews. His writings also reflect the irresolvable conflict between emerging feminism and the relentless -scientific- discourse of misogyny,...

Italy has long exerted a particular fascination on the Germans, and this has been reflected in German literature, most prominently in Goethe's Italienische Reise but also by numerous other writers who have returned to the topic. This book is concerned with two inextricably linked images - those of the German traveler in Italy and of Italy in German literature in the first third of the 19th century. Goethe's publication of his account nearly three decades after his actual journey was in some measure a vehicle to resist the challenge of a new generation of writers, who in turn would confront...

The fascinating and controversial German writer of dramas and novellas Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) is one of the most interesting objects of analysis for scholars of German literature even today, nearly two centuries after his death by suicide. In recent years, disagreements among Kleist scholars have been so extreme that some have suggested that his work subverts the very process of interpretation. Sean Allan challenges this view and the related one of Kleist as a profound pessimist. He argues that the focus on Kleist's uninterpretability has obscured important elements of social...

Goethe's relations with the English-speaking world have been the subject of scholarly investigation ever since his lifetime. This volume brings together eighteen articles that provide new points of view, a broad range of approaches, and new and original findings on this relationship. These range from the discussion of applications of recent critical approaches such as chaos theory and Edward Said's Orientalism to Goethean texts, through other more empirical contributions that bring to light new material, some of it deriving from archives in Weimar relating to Goethe's contact with English...

For the German-speaking peoples under the Carolingians (c. AD 750-950), the dominant literary tongue was Latin, the lingua franca of the Christian West. Before the eighth century only isolated words, legal terms, and proper names from the vernacular dialects had found their way into manuscripts. Cyril Edwards's collection of essays examines the breakthrough into literacy of the dialects known collectively as Old High German in the south and Old Saxon in the north. In an introductory essay, Edwards surveys the recording and survival of the earliest continuous German texts. This leads into...

In what is still the standard survey of German historical drama, Das deutsche Geschichtsdrama (1952), Friedrich Sengle understands -historical drama- as that in which objective history is blended with an idea that is the basis of its dramatic coherence and force. This idea inevitably becomes the engine of a dramatic action, inclining the theatergoer to become wholly engaged with dramatic characters in a dramatic present, rather than with -real- figures in a historical past. Such plays (for instance Schiller's Maria Stuart) may remain broadly -true to history, - but the experience they afford...

This is the first comparative study of a highly unlikely group of authors: eighteenth-century women peasants in England, Scotland, and Germany, women who, as a rule, received little or no formal education and lived by manual labor, many of them in dire poverty. Among them are the English washerwoman Mary Collier, the English domestic servants Elizabeth Hands and Molly Leapor, the German cowherd Anna Louisa Karsch, the Scottish diarywoman Janet Little, the Scottish domestic servant Christian Milne, and the English milkmaid Ann Cromartie Yearsley. Their literature is here linked with one of the...

The Austrian novelist Hermann Broch ranks with Kafka and Musil among the three greatest 20th-century Austrian novelists and belongs to the century's most gifted novelists in German from whatever country. He established his reputation with The Sleepwalkers, a trilogy of political and philosophical novels. His best-known work is The Death of Virgil, a long, challenging work in a lyrical, exuberant, and sometimes nearly incomprehensible style, a kind of cerebral stream-of-consciousness of the dying Virgil. Broch also wrote extensively about modern art and architecture, Hofmannsthal, and mass...

This book presents a comprehensive, lively account of recent developments in German fiction at a moment when--for the first time in many years--German authors are once again the subject of international attention and acclaim. It introduces English-speaking audiences to the complex dilemmas that are shaping the ways in which Germans are presently defining themselves, their difficult past, and the new -Berlin Republic.- The theme that runs throughout the volume is the ongoing debate on German -normalization.- In offering a wide-ranging consideration of contemporary German literature, the book...